Ringfort (Cashel), Clash, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the east bank of the Flesk River in County Kerry, a densely overgrown oval mound sits in level pasture, its origins and identity caught somewhere between the ancient and the quietly sorrowful.
It may be a cashel, a type of early medieval stone-walled enclosure typically used as a farmstead or small settlement, but the local community has long understood it by a different name entirely: Cahireenaleanbh, meaning roughly "the little cahir of the children", a children's burial ground.
Ordnance Survey maps from 1846 show the site as a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, set within a wooded area. By the 1893 to 1894 survey, it was recorded as a slightly oval form, still wooded. Today the mound measures approximately 40 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, its edges blurred by overgrowth and by the removal of stones in the recent past, a process that has gradually obscured whatever structural evidence once remained. The name and its associated use were formally noted in the 1940s as part of the Schools Manuscript collection, a county-wide folklore-gathering project, which described the place as "a circle surrounded by a stone wall" used as a burial ground. Children's burial grounds of this kind, known in Irish as cilliní, were used across Ireland for centuries to inter unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated ground. They occupy a particular place in Irish rural memory, often sited at old earthworks, field boundaries, or ancient enclosures, their locations preserved more through local knowledge than through any official record.
What survives at Clash now is less a legible monument than a presence: a raised, overgrown form that local memory has kept meaningful long after its stonework began to disappear.