Ringfort (Cashel), Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

On the south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, in open mountain terrain above the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of ancient stone hut sites sits within the remains of what may once have been a substantial circular enclosure.

The site is known as Clochán an Ardáin, and what makes it quietly puzzling is that its true nature remains unresolved. The structures, three or four in number, are surrounded by an old field wall, but the early Ordnance Survey maps place them within a larger circular feature, labelled simply as Fort on the Fair Plan.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister recorded the enclosure in 1899, measuring its diameter at approximately 37 metres, and it is on the basis of this that the site has been tentatively identified as a cashel. A cashel is a type of early medieval ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, a construction method well suited to the rocky Atlantic landscapes of the far west of Ireland. The clocháin themselves, the individual stone hut sites, are a related form of dry-stone structure, corbelled into a beehive shape, and several fine examples survive elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula. Whether the enclosure at Clochán an Ardáin was ever truly a cashel, or whether what remains is a later field boundary that obscures or overlaps an older monument, is not definitively settled. The site sits in a landscape already dense with early Christian and prehistoric remains, and the ambiguity of its classification is more a reflection of the complexity of that terrain than of any failure of investigation.

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