Ringfort (Cashel), Killoe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the south-facing slopes of Bentee mountain in County Kerry, an ancient enclosure sits half-consumed by vegetation, its walls subsiding slowly back into the hillside.
Known in Irish as An Chathair, a term for a stone-built ringfort, the site overlooks the valley of the Oghermong river to the west. What makes it quietly compelling is not grandeur but accumulation: within a single, overgrown oval, at least three distinct features survive in various states of ruin, each pointing to a settlement that was once considerably more than a wall on a hill.
The enclosing bank is oval in plan, measuring roughly 16.3 metres east to west and 11.6 metres north to south internally. It is best read along its northern arc, where it still stands 1.5 metres high on the interior face and retains large boulders in its lower courses, the hallmark of drystone construction built to last. To the south, where the slope drops away and the ground would have been more exposed, the wall has largely collapsed and is now little more than a smear of overgrown rubble. Inside the enclosure, in its southern half, are the remnants of a drystone hut, recorded on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map as "Cloghaun (site of)", a cloghaun being a small corbelled stone structure. It measures 5.3 metres by 4.2 metres internally, with walls averaging a metre thick. Close by, just to the south-east, an 8-metre trench cut into the ground, aligned roughly north-west to south-west, most likely represents a collapsed or deliberately exposed souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. The Ordnance Survey maps labelled it simply "Cave". A short section of well-preserved drystone masonry survives at the trench's north-eastern edge, offering a clear glimpse of the original construction.
The site rewards careful looking rather than casual inspection. The northern sector of the enclosing wall is the most legible, where the stonework still has real height and definition. The souterrain trench, visible to the south-east of the hut remains, is one of the more accessible indicators of how layered and purposeful a settlement like this once was, even as the vegetation closes steadily over it.