Ringfort (Cashel), Gearha, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Gearha, Co. Kerry

On a low knoll in boggy, rock-strewn pasture near the Gaddagh river in south Kerry, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits in a state of quiet dissolution.

What was once a substantial dry-stone cashel, a type of ringfort built from stone rather than earthen banks, has gradually merged with the landscape around it, its walls collapsing inward and outward over centuries, peat accumulating against its exterior like sediment around a half-submerged object. The result is something that reads less as a ruin and more as a thickening of the ground, a subtle rise and fall of terrain that rewards careful attention.

The enclosure measures just under 33 metres across internally, and its bank, still standing 2.1 metres high on the outside, narrows to about 1.2 metres on the interior face, giving some sense of the original mass of stonework involved. A 2-metre entrance gap survives at the north-east, and a causeway, now inconspicuous, once carried visitors across a shallow fosse, a defensive ditch, that runs around the outer edge of the bank; it remains most legible in the north-east and south-west sectors, averaging around 45 centimetres deep and 2.8 metres wide. Inside, clustered in the north-east quadrant, are two small circular stone huts. The larger of the two has an internal diameter of just 4.2 metres; the smaller barely 3.4 metres. Both are reduced to low stony banks, their entrance gaps still oriented roughly north-west. Between them and the centre of the enclosure, an L-shaped depression measuring approximately 6 by 5.5 metres may represent a souterrain, an underground passage or storage chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement, its stone-faced western wall just visible towards the southern end. A scatter of low, partly peat-covered walls sits outside the cashel to the north-west, their relationship to the main enclosure unclear but suggestive of further activity in the surrounding area.

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Pete F
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