Ringfort (Cashel), Dromtine, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Inside this early medieval enclosure on the western edge of the Sneem river valley, a standing stone rises more than four metres from the ground, planted close against the inner face of the surrounding wall.
That alone would be unusual. What makes it stranger still is a persistent local tradition, collected by the Irish Folklore Commission, that the stone carries an ogham inscription, the early medieval script used to record the Irish language in a series of notches and strokes along a stone's edge. Surveyors have found no such inscription, at least none that is currently legible. The belief lingers without apparent physical confirmation.
The enclosure itself is a caher, a term used in the Irish-speaking southwest for a roughly circular stone-walled ringfort. This one sits on a low rise above the bog-covered valley, with Dromtine Lough about 500 metres to the south. Its enclosing wall is three metres wide, built from earth and stone in irregular courses with occasional upright slabs set along its base, both inside and out. The wall's interior face stands roughly 75 centimetres high, while externally it drops away into a fosse, a defensive ditch, which is about 2.25 metres wide and survives best along the northern and western sides, where it reaches 60 centimetres below the surrounding ground level. The entrance, on the eastern side, is nearly two metres long and is carefully defined by stone slabs set on edge. The standing stone, oriented roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, measures 1.2 metres by 0.4 metres at its base and leans slightly to the west. Its presence inside a ringfort is not common, and its relationship to the enclosure, whether it predates it, was incorporated into it, or was raised at the same time, remains an open question.
Surrounding the caher is a network of early field boundaries, largely constructed from boulders and edge-set slabs, with stretches buried under peat. Together with the enclosure and its enigmatic standing stone, they suggest a landscape that was once organised and inhabited in ways the bog has only partially preserved.