Ringfort (Cashel), Ballylongane, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Cashel), Ballylongane, Co. Kerry

There is a stone fort in Ballylongane, in north County Kerry, that no surveyor has been permitted to enter.

What is known about it comes largely from old maps rather than from anyone who has walked its interior, which gives it an unusual quality among the many ringforts scattered across the Irish countryside. A cashel or cathair, to use its Irish names, is a type of ringfort built from unmortared stone rather than earthen banks, and this particular example is univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing wall rather than the concentric rings that mark more elaborate fortifications of the type.

The fort appears clearly on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1842, its circular outline confidently drawn. By the time the later edition was produced in 1916, only a tiny section of the western sector was recorded, suggesting that much of the structure had by then deteriorated or been obscured. It sits immediately to the west of a disused burial ground, which is itself a detail that adds a certain gravity to the location. Such adjacencies between early enclosures and later Christian burial sites are not uncommon in Ireland, where landscapes tend to accumulate layers of use over long periods. The published description of the site, drawn from C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey of 1995, notes plainly that permission to inspect or survey the fort was refused, leaving the structure's present condition a matter of inference rather than record.

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