Ringfort (Cashel), Ballybrack, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Ballybrack, Co. Kerry

On the south-western edge of Lough Currane in County Kerry, the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map marks an enclosure that has since vanished entirely from the landscape.

No surface trace of it remains, which places it in an odd category: a site known primarily through its absence, recorded just in time before the ground absorbed it completely.

When O'Connell visited and documented the site in 1937 for the OPW, there was still enough surviving to describe. It was a caher, meaning a stone-walled ringfort of a type common across early medieval Ireland, roughly circular and approximately 26 metres across. The enclosing wall was already in a very ruined condition at that point, but the interior had yielded up more detail. The foundations of two huts survived in the southern half of the enclosure, one of them around 6.7 metres in diameter, and both had their entrances oriented inward, facing towards the centre of the site. More intriguingly, each hut also contained an opening to what may have been a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or concealment. Having two such access points, one from each hut, suggests the passages may have been connected or at least part of a deliberate arrangement rather than isolated features. Roughly 23 metres to the south of the caher, a boulder was noted with what O'Connell described as sharpening scores on its surface, the kind of repetitive groove left by generations of tool or blade maintenance.

What makes the site quietly melancholy is how complete the erasure has been. The internal layout O'Connell recorded, the paired hut foundations, the inward-facing doorways, the subterranean openings, and the scored boulder a short distance away, was already fragmentary in 1937. Today there is nothing left to locate in the field.

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Pete F
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