Ringfort (Cashel), Cathair Samháin, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cathair Samháin, Co. Kerry

What makes Cahersavane unusual is not simply its age but the engineering ambition preserved within its stone.

A caher, or cashel, is a type of ringfort built from dry stone rather than earthworks, and this example on the eastern side of the Cummeragh river valley in County Kerry goes considerably further than a simple enclosing wall. The inner face of the circular rampart rises in a series of stepped terraces, three for most of its circuit and four along a short eastern stretch, creating what amounts to an internal staircase in stone. That kind of deliberate terracing, built from unhewn blocks laid in well-coursed courses around a rubble core, points to a structure that was carefully designed rather than thrown up for convenience.

The caher sits on a gentle west-facing slope in rough pastureland, and from within its walls the ground opens out across Lough Currane to Ballinskelligs Bay. The enclosing rampart averages 2.5 metres in height and survives to a maximum external height of 3.9 metres at the south-east, with a basal width averaging 3.6 metres. Beyond the wall itself lies a wide berm, roughly 10 metres across, and beyond that a flat-bottomed fosse, or defensive ditch, up to 4 metres wide, its inner face revetted with drystone masonry surviving almost continuously from east to west-north-west. An earthen bank sits beyond the fosse, itself up to 6 metres wide. The entrance, now blocked, was originally 3.6 metres wide and faced west-north-west. Three later field boundaries radiate outward from the enclosing wall, one from the entrance and one each at the north-east and south-east, suggesting the site was absorbed into later agricultural arrangements long after its original purpose had passed. A cleared strip running from the entrance toward the interior likely reflects stone removal for those same boundaries, a quiet record of centuries of practical reuse laid over the original plan.

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