Ringfort (Cashel), Doory, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
At the western foot of Coomduff ridge in County Kerry, a rough circle of tumbled stone sits in rough pasture, its enclosing wall so low in places that a casual walker might step over it without a second thought.
This is a caher, a type of ringfort built from dry-stone rather than earthen banks, and what makes this one quietly interesting is precisely how little of it remains visible above ground. Its southern arc still rises to about a metre on the outside, but the western side has slumped to barely thirty centimetres, and internally the wall hardly clears the turf at all. No entrance can be identified. What was once a defined enclosure has become something more like a suggestion.
The site is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 23.5 metres north to south and 20.7 metres east to west, dimensions that place it within the range of a typical small farming enclosure of the early medieval period, when cahers and their earthen equivalents, raths, served as the enclosed homesteads of farming families across Ireland. The enclosing wall, where its two stone faces can still be made out intermittently through the sod, has a basal width of 2.3 metres, which points to an original structure of some solidity. Part of the south-eastern arc has been further obscured by a later field boundary, one of the most common agents of confusion at sites like this, where centuries of agricultural reorganisation gradually swallow and rearrange older features. Inside the enclosure, stone lies in irregular heaps, much of it almost certainly field clearance debris accumulated long after the site fell out of use. More interesting is a sod-covered arc in the southern part of the interior, about 1.3 metres wide and half a metre high, which may represent the remains of a hut structure, the kind of modest circular or oval building that would once have stood within the protected space of the enclosure.