Ringfort (Cashel), Na Gearreidhní, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Cashel), Na Gearreidhní, Co. Kerry

In the boggy pasture south of the Oweveen river on the Iveragh Peninsula, a circular stone enclosure sits quietly in the landscape, its ancient purpose quietly overlaid by centuries of agricultural practicality.

What makes this small caher, a type of stone-walled ringfort built without mortar, worth pausing over is not its grandeur but its layering: early medieval stonework pressed into service as a sheepfold, the original entrance possibly still readable as an eroded gap in the wall, the whole thing half-dissolved back into the bog.

The enclosure measures roughly 16.3 metres north to south and 14.7 metres east to west, which is modest even by caher standards. Its wall, where it survives, is faced on both inner and outer sides with large boulder-like slabs laid in rough horizontal courses around a rubble core, and still stands to an average external height of about 1.1 metres, with a width of 2.5 metres. The upper surface has been colonised by peaty sod. The southern sector of the enclosing wall has been lost entirely, and a modern sheepfold cuts across where it would have continued to the south-east. A gap of around 1.5 metres at the west-south-west is thought to be the original entrance, worn and eroded but still legible. Inside, a large circular stone hut, itself a substantial piece of early construction with a well-preserved drystone wall standing 1.45 metres high and up to 2 metres wide, takes up almost the whole interior. A modern dividing wall splits it into two pens, giving it its current life as a double sheepfold. Its east-facing entrance, 1.1 metres wide and marked by an upright slab on its southern side, survives intact. The site sits just south of the river that flows westward from Lough Iskanamacteery, in a stretch of landscape where the ground is wet, the history is long, and the boundaries between old and new are not always easy to draw.

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Pete F
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