Ringfort (Cashel), Killeenagh, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Cashel), Killeenagh, Co. Kerry

What you see at Killeenagh today is not quite a ringfort and not quite a farmyard enclosure, but an awkward layering of both.

The most visible feature on the ground is a disused sub-rectangular enclosure of relatively modern construction, its walls sitting directly on top of the debris of something far older. Beneath and around it lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort common in early medieval Ireland, with an internal diameter of around 25 metres. Its enclosing wall survives now only as a spread of collapsed stone, between 3.6 and 7.5 metres wide in places and rising no higher than 1.4 metres. Two short stretches of the original outer wall-face remain exposed, at the south-south-east and north-north-west, and a 10-metre arc of what is likely the inner wall-face can still be traced at the north-west. The site sits on a south-facing slope with views down towards Castlemaine Harbour, which suggests its original position was chosen with some deliberateness.

When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map was produced in the early nineteenth century, the cashel was recorded as a circular univallate enclosure, meaning it had a single enclosing wall rather than the multiple concentric rings found at more elaborate sites. At some point after that survey, the site was substantially modified. A laneway was cut along its eastern edge, removing part of the earlier wall in the process. The modern enclosure was then imposed over the ruins, its northern, southern, and western walls each built on or across the remains of the cashel. Local tradition held that the outlines of around three circular buildings were once visible in the interior, consistent with the kind of domestic settlement such enclosures typically contained in the early medieval period. Much of the stone was quarried away for reuse as building material, however, and no interior features remain identifiable today. About 100 metres to the south-west lies a separate small enclosure, now buried under dense vegetation, and in the north-east corner of the same field is a roughly rectangular enclosure of unknown date and function, defined by low banks of earth and stone. Their relationship to the cashel is unclear, which is part of what makes the wider site so quietly complicated to read.

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Pete F
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