Ringfort (Cashel), Derrynacaheragh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Derrynacaheragh, Co. Kerry

What gives this cashel in Derrynacaheragh its quiet architectural interest is a problem its builders solved with some care: the ground slopes.

A cashel is a type of ringfort enclosed by a drystone wall rather than an earthen bank, and this one sits on a south-east-facing hillside in the valley of the Feabunaun stream in south-west Kerry. To keep the interior usable, the south-eastern portion of the floor was built up by roughly 65 centimetres, leaving the enclosed space level despite the gradient of the hillside beneath it. It is the kind of practical ingenuity that tends to go unnoticed, buried under centuries of pasture grass.

The structure is roughly circular, measuring about 24.9 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west. Its enclosing wall, built in drystone, stands around a metre high and runs to a thickness of about 1.5 metres, with large facing stones on both sides and smaller rubble packed between them. On the uphill, western to north-eastern arc, the builders cut into the slope itself, creating a scarp face some 2.1 metres high, backed by a further drystone wall that has partially collapsed. A damaged entrance, about 2.1 metres wide, opens to the north-east. Sections of both the inner and outer faces of the main wall have been rebuilt in recent times, and field-clearance rubble, stone gathered from the surrounding land and piled out of the way over generations, sits against the outer wall face at intervals around the eastern and western sides. Modern field boundaries meet the cashel at three points, folding the ancient enclosure into the working landscape around it.

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