Ringfort (Cashel), Cloon, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Cloon, Co. Kerry

At 260 metres above sea level on a Kerry hillside, a stone enclosure sits surrounded by blanket peat on three sides, its walls slowly being reclaimed by gorse and sod.

This is a cashel, a type of ringfort defined by a circular or oval stone wall rather than an earthen bank and ditch, and what makes this particular example quietly remarkable is not the enclosure alone but what surrounds it: a ghost landscape of field walls, hut platforms, and managed ground that suggests a community once organised an entire hillslope from this single focal point.

The cashel is oval in plan, oriented northwest to southeast, with a maximum diameter of 30 metres. Its defining wall is substantial, between 2 and 3 metres thick and surviving to between 0.8 and 1.6 metres in height, though much of it has collapsed over time. On the western, downslope side, stretches of the external face remain largely intact, built from medium to large rubble stones with boulders and even outcrops of bedrock forming the base. The single entrance, a 2-metre-wide gap on the northeast, is flanked by an orthostat, a large upright stone, measuring 1.25 metres long and nearly a metre tall. Inside, at least three drystone hut structures survive: a sub-rectangular hut just inside the entrance measuring 2.2 by 1.7 metres internally, a smaller oval structure tucked beside the entrance orthostat, and a sub-circular hut built against the southern wall with a cairn to its east. A possible fourth structure lies to the west, where a linear cairn runs alongside exposed bedrock.

What elevates this site beyond a single monument is the relict field system radiating out from it across roughly half a square kilometre of hillslope, bounded by a townland boundary to the north, Coom Lough to the northeast, and a stream draining south towards Lough Reagh. At least two of the low field walls, typically no more than 0.4 metres high and partly buried under blanket peat in the wetter ground, appear to start at the cashel itself, extending outward from either side of the northern entrance as though the enclosure were the organisational centre of the whole arrangement. Four further hut sites have been identified within this wider system, three of them abutting the relict walls. The peat that now obscures sections of those walls also preserves them, keeping below the surface a pattern of land use that would otherwise have long since disappeared.

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