Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloghanelinaghan, Co. Kerry

On the northern slope of Castlequin, overlooking Coonanna Harbour on the Iveragh Peninsula, there sits a cluster of ancient stonework that does not appear on any Ordnance Survey map.

That absence alone sets it apart. Most early medieval cashels, the term used in Kerry for stone-walled ringforts, earn at least a cartographic footnote, however faint. This one has gone unrecorded in that sense, surviving instead through the observations of a single scholar and the quiet persistence of its own ruins.

The site was described by a researcher identified as Henry, writing in 1957, who found what she called a series of ruins straddling either side of the highest modern field boundary. Within the small, ruinous stone fort she noted the remains of several hut sites. To the east, beyond the fence, lay a ruined oval enclosure measuring roughly 2.1 metres by 1.7 metres internally, with an entrance gap in its northern wall, possibly the footprint of a single dwelling. A short distance further north stood a second, less carefully constructed structure, larger at approximately 4.7 metres by 2.7 metres across internally, suggesting a working space or animal shelter rather than a dwelling. Taken together, the remains point to a small settlement of the kind that once dotted the hillsides of south Kerry, where farming families in the early medieval period enclosed their homes and livestock within circular or oval stone walls.

Access to the site is not straightforward. When Henry visited, permission to enter the land was refused, and that circumstance is worth keeping in mind. The ruins lie on private ground, the approach is unmarked, and the site carries none of the signage or infrastructure that accompanies protected monuments elsewhere on the peninsula.

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