Ringfort (Cashel), Coars, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the high eastern slopes of Keelnagore mountain on the Iveragh Peninsula, a small circular enclosure sits entirely unrecorded on Ordnance Survey maps, its existence known mainly to those who have gone looking.
The site is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort enclosed by a stone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one has been so thoroughly reduced by time and weather that its defining perimeter survives partly as a low stony bank, partly as nothing more than a scattered line of boulders. A short stretch of coursed drystone walling persists at the south-west, buried under heavy overgrowth, but the overall circuit, roughly 14 metres across, is barely legible as a structure at all. What rescues the site from anonymity is what lies beneath it.
Set into the north-east quadrant of the interior is a souterrain, an underground passage of the kind built throughout early medieval Ireland, most likely for storage or refuge. Two edge-set slabs mark the entrance, which is low enough, at just 45 centimetres high, to require crawling. Beyond that threshold, a 3-metre passage runs westward, its walls built in coursed drystone and its ceiling formed from flat lintels, wide enough at 1.1 metres and tall enough at 1.25 metres to move through with some ease once inside. At the western end, a second threshold narrows dramatically into a creepway formed from two jambs and a lintel, measuring just 56 centimetres high and 38 centimetres wide. This constriction opens into a second passage running north to south, approximately 4 metres long, with its southern end now blocked by a collapse of earth and stone. At the northern end, what may be a deliberate air-vent survives. The careful construction of this two-chamber system, with its deliberate bottleneck between the passages, suggests a design intended to slow or deter intruders rather than simply provide shelter. The terraced interior of the enclosure above, and the scatter of slabs across its northern half, hint at a settlement that was once considerably more substantial than what remains.