Ringfort (Cashel), Bailín, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Bailín, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites are remarkable for what they contain.

This one is remarkable for what it no longer does. On the north-eastern slope of Beenarourke, in the Bailín townland of south Kerry, there once stood a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort built to enclose a farmstead or small settlement during the early medieval period. It left no visible mark on the ground, and nobody living nearby appears to retain any memory of it at all. Its existence is known only because nineteenth-century mapmakers recorded it, first as a circular enclosure on the original Ordnance Survey map, and again as a 'Caher' on the OS Fair Plan, using the Irish word for a stone fort. Without those two cartographic notes, the site would be entirely unknown.

A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented it in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, placing it in rough pasture on the north-eastern side of Beenarourke. By the time of that survey, nothing remained above ground to examine. Whether the structure was robbed for building stone over the centuries, gradually subsumed into agricultural land, or simply collapsed and was cleared, is not recorded. The cashel at Bailín sits in a long tradition of vanished enclosures across Kerry, where dozens of similar sites appear on early maps or in historical records but have since dissolved back into the landscape entirely, leaving only a name or a grid reference behind.

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