Ringfort (Cashel), Liss, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Cashel), Liss, Co. Kerry

On Ordnance Survey maps, this site near the Staigue river is labelled "Killeen Burial Ground", which might lead a curious reader to expect graves.

What they would find instead, if they looked carefully enough, is the low, scattered remains of a caher, a type of stone ringfort built from dry-stone walling rather than earthen banks, and one whose original purpose appears to have little to do with burial at all.

The structure sits on gently sloping pasture to the west of the Staigue river, with Kenmare Bay visible to the south. It is roughly oval in plan, measuring around 19 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west internally. The enclosing wall, where it can still be traced along the northern arc, stands only one or two courses high and runs about 2.7 metres wide. Its construction follows a method common to early medieval Kerry: large coursed slabs on the inner and outer faces, with a rubble core packed between them. A more recent field wall cuts straight through the site on a north-northwest to south-southeast line, and the southern half of the caher has been further obscured beneath accumulated field clearance material, the kind of loose stone farmers piled up over generations when clearing ground for grazing. Between the bisecting wall and the buried southern half, the original enclosure has been effectively dismantled by later agricultural activity, leaving no identifiable features in the interior. The "killeen" designation on the maps is a peculiarity worth noting. Killeens were traditionally unconsecrated burial grounds used for unbaptised infants or others excluded from church burial, and such associations sometimes attached themselves to older, already-ruined enclosures that local communities repurposed or simply misread across time. Whether that is what happened here, the physical evidence no longer says.

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