Site of Cromwell's Fort, Kenmare, Co. Kerry

A faint depression in a field on the east side of the road, a barely perceptible level platform, and that is about it. The site is marked on Ordnance Survey maps as Cromwell's Fort, though the fort itself had been described as ruined before the eighteenth century was even properly underway, and a contemporary manuscript account dismissed it as, at best, inconsiderable.

The structure that once stood here was an earthwork fortification, likely a bastioned fort, meaning an angular, low-profile defensive work designed to deflect cannon fire rather than present high walls as a target. It appears on the Down Survey barony map of 1655 to 1656, the great Cromwellian land census of Ireland, under the name 'Neeleene forte', a rendering of Nedeen, the Irish name for the settlement that would become Kenmare. A manuscript account of Kerry, preserved in Trinity College Dublin, records that the fort was built by Cromwell's forces at the mouth of Kenmare Bay specifically to subdue the O'Sullivans, the Gaelic lords of the surrounding territory of Glanarought. The same manuscript, written around 1685, notes the fort was already ruined by that point, having served its purpose, if it ever truly did, only briefly. The barony itself, the account observes, had once been densely forested with fine timber, much of it destroyed by the ironworks that came with colonial settlement. By the time Samuel Lewis mentioned a tower called Cromwell's Fort near the ferry or Sound in his 1837 topographical dictionary, no visible trace of that structure remained either.

The site today sits within a public park at the southern edge of Kenmare town. The traces of the fosse, a defensive ditch, and the platform are on the east side of the road running along the promontory, not the west side where the OS maps originally indicated the fort's location. It is an easy place to walk past without realising what, or rather what is no longer, there.