Ringfort (Cashel), Aughacasla, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
There is nothing left to see at Aughacasla, and that absence is itself part of the story.
On the level coastal plain that borders the southern shore of Tralee Bay, roughly 250 metres from the water's edge, a small early medieval enclosure once sat in the open landscape. It is gone now, cleared away by the landowner sometime before the mid-1980s, and what remains is only a description of what was there.
The site appeared on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map as a circular mound, which is how many such features were recorded before closer investigation revised their classification. The landowner, speaking to archaeologists working on the Dingle Peninsula survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986, described finding a circular band of loose stones enclosing what looked like the foundations of a square structure. The whole thing measured somewhere between ten and fifteen metres across. That description points to a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a dry-stone enclosing wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch. Cashels are common along the western seaboard, where stone was more readily available than the deep soils needed for earthwork construction. The square internal structure, if that is what it was, would likely have served as a small dwelling or agricultural building, typical of the enclosed farmsteads that dotted the Irish countryside during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries.
What makes the Aughacasla site quietly arresting is not its scale or its survival, but the particular timing of its disappearance. It was documented just as it ceased to exist, caught in the gap between mapping and demolition, known now only through a brief account of loose stones and a vanished outline in the grass.