Ringfort (Rath), Cappanacush, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Beneath an ordinary garden in Cappanacush, Co. Kerry, a subterranean passage waits in darkness.
The house and its boundary wall sit on ground that was once a ringfort, one of the thousands of circular earthen enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period as farmsteads and places of refuge. The earthworks themselves are long gone, levelled so thoroughly that no trace of the enclosure remains above ground. But the souterrain, an underground stone-lined tunnel typically associated with these forts and used for storage or concealment, has not entirely disappeared. Two small openings survive, one on each side of the garden wall, hinting at a passage that runs roughly north-east to south-west beneath the property.
The fort was already in poor condition when Ordnance Survey teams recorded it in the nineteenth century, describing it as almost entirely levelled with a souterrain that had been closed up. By the time the second edition of the OS map was produced, the site merited only the designation 'site of', the cartographic equivalent of a shrug. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented it in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, drawing on those earlier Ordnance Survey field notes and adding what little could be observed on the ground. The picture they assembled was one of near-total loss, with the souterrain surviving only as two blocked mouths in a garden wall.
There is not much to see here in any conventional sense, and the site is on private land. What makes it quietly worth knowing about is the stubbornness of what lies beneath. The fill blocking both openings has prevented anyone from entering or properly surveying the passage, so its full extent remains unknown. A ringfort that vanished from maps and memory still holds something underground, inaccessible and unexamined, in a Kerry garden.