Ringfort (Cashel), Coill Bhaile Uí Fhlaithimh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the lower north-western slopes of Cummeen mountain, overlooking the valley of the Owencashla river, a roughly oval enclosure sits in quiet collapse.
Known as Caherbaun, or An Chathair Bhán, this is a cashel, a type of stone ringfort built without mortar, in which a substantial drystone wall would once have enclosed a small settlement. What makes this particular example quietly absorbing is not the wall itself, which has largely tumbled into a band of stony debris about three metres wide and rarely more than a metre high, but what survives inside it: the compressed remains of four, possibly five, separate house-sites, none of which were recorded in the original Ordnance Survey name books for the area.
The cashel interior, measuring roughly 26.7 metres north to south and 22.4 metres east to west, is busy with the ghostly footprints of habitation. Two rectangular drystone houses survive with enough of their walls intact to read their dimensions clearly. The larger of the two, in the southern sector, measured 8.2 metres east to west internally, and at some point its western floor was excavated to reveal a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used in early medieval Ireland for storage or concealment. The visible stretch of this passage extends about 1.4 metres before being blocked, though probing suggested it continued a little further south. A second house, set just west of centre, retains a 5.5-metre passageway leading away from its southern entrance, defined by large stones set on their sides. Elsewhere in the enclosure, two further hollows with stony rims may represent additional hut-sites, though their outlines are too faint to be certain. At the north-north-west, a crescent-shaped mound measuring nine metres by three metres abuts the outer face of the cashel wall; its purpose has not been established. The site was surveyed by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey published in 1986, and it is from that work that the detailed measurements and observations derive.