Ringfort (Cashel), Lack, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Cashel), Lack, Co. Kerry

On a gentle south-facing slope overlooking Castlemaine Harbour in County Kerry, a circular stone enclosure sits quietly in a field, its walls reduced largely to a rubble bank by centuries of stone-robbing.

What makes this cashel, a type of ringfort built with a dry-stone masonry wall rather than an earthen bank, worth pausing over is not its present condition but the density of what it once contained. Inside a roughly twenty-metre enclosure, two distinct early medieval structures survive in partial form, and around the cashel in the same field, several other features of entirely unclear purpose add to the puzzle.

The interior held both a clochaun and a souterrain. A clochaun is a corbelled dry-stone hut, typically associated with early Christian or early medieval settlement, and the example here was circular in plan with an overall diameter of 7.75 metres. Its wall has collapsed inwards, leaving only a single outer course visible, the stones set upright on edge rather than laid flat, a technique shared with the cashel wall itself. Beneath the western part of the interior runs a souterrain, an underground passage of the sort used throughout early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. This one is a short NNE-SSW passage, just 3.4 metres long and around 0.8 metres wide, with slightly inward-inclining dry-stone walls and a flagged roof. Collapse has reduced its accessible height to 0.7 metres, and the southern end is entirely blocked; it may once have extended further. A narrow gap of about 0.4 metres in the south-west of the enclosing wall is thought to mark the original entrance. Scattered around the same field are further enigmatic features: a rectangular stony platform, a low earthen ridge, a crescent-shaped grass-grown mound of stones to the south, and a shallow stony depression beside it. Whether any of these relate to the cashel, or belong to a different phase of activity altogether, remains unresolved.

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Pete F
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