Qualla: Leacanabuaile

Leacanabuaile: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HKath74, CC0. The Irish name tells you what this place once was: Leacanabuaile, the hillside of the milking-place. Strip away the romance of stone ringforts and you find a farmer, sometime in the 9th century, who needed a defended yard for his cows and his family, and who built one out of every loose stone he could lift from the surrounding fields. The walls he raised are still standing thirteen hundred years later. They are over two metres high, three and a third metres thick, and they hold three intact stone beehive huts and a covered underground passage in their interior. It is not the largest ringfort in Ireland by a long way, but it might be the most legible.

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Image: HKath74 | CC0

Leacanabuaile: A Farmstead, Not a Castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HKath74, CC0. We are used to the word fort meaning defence against armies, but the cashel at Leacanabuaile was something more modest and more practical. The 9th and 10th centuries in this part of Kerry were a time of small landholders, cattle raids by neighbours, and occasional Viking trouble ...

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Image: HKath74 | CC0

Leacanabuaile: Three Beehive Huts and a Souterrain

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HKath74, CC0. Step through the eastern gateway and you find the interior arrangement that gives Leacanabuaile its character. There are three stone beehive houses, the corbelled drystone domes that western Ireland built for centuries because they suited the available stone and the available wea...

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Image: HKath74 | CC0

Leacanabuaile: What the 1939 Dig Found

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HKath74, CC0. Excavated in 1939 and 1940, the cashel gave up the small objects of an ordinary working life. The list is plain and revealing: iron knives and pins, bone combs, fragments of bronze, a millstone, scraps of lead. Nothing aristocratic. Nothing that would make a museum's headline dis...

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Image: HKath74 | CC0

Leacanabuaile: Cahergal, Just Next Door

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HKath74, CC0. Leacanabuaile does not stand alone. Three kilometres northwest of Cahersiveen, and only a short walk from its slightly larger and more famous neighbour Cahergal, this is one of a small cluster of stone cashels that survive remarkably well in this corner of Kerry. The two forts to...

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Image: HKath74 | CC0