Ringfort (Cashel), Killiney, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Killiney, Co. Kerry

What survives of this early medieval enclosure at the base of the Magharees Peninsula is, on first inspection, almost nothing: a low circular platform of earth, rising barely a metre above the flat, slightly marshy ground that borders Lough Gill.

No wall stands, no hut survives, and the whole thing could easily be read as a natural feature of the landscape. Yet the platform itself, measuring roughly 29.5 metres north to south and 26.5 metres east to west, is the ghost of something considerably more substantial.

A researcher named Curran, whose work fed into J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, recorded the site as a stone cashel, a type of ringfort enclosed by a dry-stone wall rather than an earthen bank. He described that wall as 16 feet thick, approximately 4.9 metres, which would have made it a serious piece of construction. None of it is now visible above ground. Curran also noted traces of two hut-sites within the enclosure, and one of these contained the entrance to a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber system of the kind commonly associated with early Irish settlement sites, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. He was told it comprised several chambers. The souterrain's location is marked on Ordnance Survey maps, and what remains visible on the surface today is a spread of stones and sea-shells covering an area of roughly 9 by 6.8 metres, a modest but oddly telling detail: the presence of sea-shells this far inland hints at domestic activity and the disposal of food waste over a long period.

The site sits close to Lough Gill on low ground that was presumably marginal even when the cashel was in use. The combination of marshy terrain, a now-vanished massive wall, a multi-chambered underground passage, and that scatter of shells gives a quiet sense of a place that was once carefully, deliberately occupied, and has since been almost entirely reclaimed by the ground it stood on.

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