Ringfort (Cashel), Derrysallagh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Derrysallagh, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing slope in Derrysallagh, amid rough hill pasture and the uneven ground of cutaway bog, a circular stone enclosure sits in a state of slow, dignified collapse.

This is a cashel, the Irish term for a ringfort built from drystone rather than earthen banks, and the fact that it has partially fallen does not diminish what it communicates about the people who once organised their lives within its walls.

The enclosure measures fifteen metres in internal diameter, defined by a drystone wall that was originally around 1.8 metres thick and still stands to roughly 1.4 metres in places. The best-preserved section of the inner face runs from the south-west around to the south-east, while the outer face holds up better between the north-west and the east, where core stones have slipped and tumbled. The entrance, two metres wide, faces north-west. Someone at some later point, likely within the last few centuries, built a rectangular structure into the southern section of the cashel wall, borrowing its ancient masonry as a convenient foundation or boundary. The loose stones scattered across the interior are probably the result of this long, incremental process of reuse and weathering. To the west and north-west, a network of relict field boundaries survives in the landscape, suggesting that the cashel was once embedded in a broader pattern of agricultural organisation, a farmed and managed hillside rather than an isolated fortification standing apart from daily life. Cashels of this kind are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, when enclosures like this served as farmsteads for individual family groups, providing shelter for people and livestock alike.

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