A Day in the Life of a Ring Fort Archaeologist on the Skellig Coast

The alarm goes off at half five in Cahersiveen, and the kettle is on before the light has finished creeping over the Carrantuohill ridge. By the time the rest of the valley is stirring, Mairéad has already laced up her boots, packed her trowel belt, and pointed the Land Cruiser down whichever boreen is calling this week. The rhythm is familiar to anyone who has spent time on the Iveragh Peninsula: the salt in the air, the cry of oystercatchers along the estuaries, the long shadow of MacGillycuddy's Reeks sitting heavy on the morning grass.

For archaeologists working the ring forts scattered between Kells and Castlecove, every dawn brings the same quiet negotiation with the weather. A coastal squall can sweep in within minutes off the Atlantic, and the bog that hides half the site can either save it from plough damage or swallow a wheelbarrow whole. The work is rarely glamorous. It is methodical, slow, and entirely dependent on reading the land.

Dawn patrol on the Iveragh Peninsula

Mairéad's first stop is usually a farm track that most tourists would drive past without a second glance. The field looks ordinary: a flattened ring of green, a stunted hawthorn in the middle, a low bank that a walker might mistake for a fence line. Yet the faint scallop in the ground tells a different story. Beneath the turf, a circular enclosure of dry-stone walling waits, with the ghost of a doorway aligned to the winter solstice sunrise. This is the kind of cashel that gave the Ring of Kerry much of its character long before the tour buses arrived.

Her kit is deceptively simple. A Marshalltown trowel, a hand brush, a 1-metre ranging frame, a clipboard worn soft at the corners, and a thermos of strong tea that would not be out of place on a station track west of Bourke. She lays out a grid with orange string and begins the slow choreography of excavation. Every flake of flint, every sherd of coarse pottery, every charcoal smear is plotted, photographed, bagged, and recorded before it ever leaves the ground.

The discipline is not patience for its own sake. Stratigraphy is the language of the soil, and once a layer is disturbed it cannot be reread. Younger layers sit above older ones, and the colour of the clay, the size of the stones, the presence of burnt bone all carry meaning. A ring fort is not a single event but a slow accumulation of lives, repairs, gatherings, abandonments, and returns. The work, in many ways, mirrors the kind of layered reading of country that Aboriginal heritage officers practise around Kakadu or along the Hawkesbury sandstone. The vocabulary differs, but the care is the same.

The tools of the trade

Ask any archaeologist on the Skellig Coast what they actually use, and the answer will sound underwhelming. No Indiana Jones kit bags, no brushes the size of tennis rackets. The kit is built around a kneeling pad, a sharp trowel, a 7.5-centimetre pointing trowel for the finer work, a plumb bob, a 30-metre tape, and a smartphone loaded with apps that record finds straight to a cloud database. A good pair of waterproof trousers is worth more than any expensive gadget, because May on the Iveragh Peninsula is rarely the dry month the guidebooks suggest.

Survey work is still done the old-fashioned way, with a dumpy level and a theodolite, though drones have transformed the early stages of every project. Aerial photographs pick up the crop marks and shadow lines of buried walls long before anyone breaks ground. On a clear morning, the drone can map an entire cashel in a single battery, leaving the team to focus on the sections that promise the best return on long hours of brushing. The technology feels modern, but the patience is ancient.

Documentation is the part visitors rarely see and the part that consumes most of an archaeologist's time. Each trench is photographed before, during, and after excavation. Each context has a written description, a drawing at 1:20 scale, and a measured section. A single 2-metre square can produce forty pages of records by the time it is closed. Anyone who has spent an afternoon filing a heritage report in a regional office in Ballina or who has watched a colleague in Brisbane wrestle with the same paperwork will recognise the rhythm. The finds are the headline, but the archive is the real legacy.

Reading the landscape and the stories beneath

The Skellig Coast is dense with ring forts because the land is generous and the ancestors were practical. A cashel was a statement as much as a refuge: a circular wall of stone on a rise, often with a souterrain cut into the bedrock beneath it for storage and escape. Caherconree, Staigue, and the unnamed examples along the Valencia hillside all follow the same logic, refined by local stone and local weather. From the air, they look like the rings left behind by giant cups pressed into green wax.

Local knowledge is what makes the difference between a sterile dig and a meaningful one. Mairéad will often be invited into a kitchen table in Portmagee or a front parlour in Sneem to hear what older residents remember. A farmer might point to a hump in a field and say, in the Kerry lilting way that turns every sentence into a small story, that his grandfather called it the fort of the small people. Whether you take the folklore literally or not, the place name is a record. Someone, at some point, knew the ring was there and chose to remember it.

This kind of oral history matters just as much to a dig in County Kerry as it does to a heritage survey along the Murray River. Across the world, the best fieldwork happens when archaeologists listen first and dig second. A bloke from Bendigo who joined the last season as a volunteer summed it up over a pint in the local: "Same as back home. Country talks, but you've got to have a yarn with the elders before you start reading the ground." He was not wrong, and he came back the following summer with a ute full of supplies and a fellow volunteer from Warrnambool.

When the weather closes in

Field seasons on the Skellig Coast are short. May to September is the reliable window, and even then a wet July can shut down a site for a week. The wind off the Atlantic is the constant companion of any excavation, drying the trenches one day and flooding them the next. Mairéad keeps tarpaulins and a roll of builder's plastic in the back of the 4WD, and she has learned to read the shape of the clouds over the Skelligs the way a sailor reads swell.

Rain does not only delay work; it also reveals it. A sudden downpour will sometimes wash clean the line of a buried wall or expose a floor surface that had been hidden under decades of turf and leaf litter. The team has learned to welcome the unexpected storm, photograph the change, and revise the plan. There is no such thing as a perfect dig, only a careful one. The aim is to leave the site better understood, well recorded, and stable against the next winter's weather.

The same conditions that make the work hard also make it worth protecting. A ring fort that has survived a thousand Kerry winters without a roof will not survive another century of sheep trampling, scrub growth, or amateur metal detecting without attention. Each dig feeds into a conservation plan that the local authority, the National Monuments Service, and community groups all have a stake in. The archaeology is a means, not an end. The end is keeping the place itself.

Heritage that lives beyond the trench

There is a temptation, after a dig, to pack up the finds and head for the laboratory. Mairéad resists it. She organises two open afternoons a season, when the locals, schoolchildren, and the summer visitors are invited onto the site to see what has been uncovered. A fresh section through a cashel wall, a child's toy spindle whorl, a charred grain of barley from a souterrain floor: these objects belong to the people of the Iveragh Peninsula as much as to the team. Sharing them is part of the job.

The Skellig Coast is best known around the world for Skellig Michael itself, the jagged UNESCO site that drew film crews and pilgrims in equal measure. The ring forts of the mainland tell a quieter, longer story of life lived in the shadow of the monastery. They speak of farming, feasting, defence, and the everyday business of raising families on a steep, beautiful, often unforgiving coast. Visitors who take an hour to wander up to Leacanabuaile or Cathair Crobh Dúin leave with a sense of the place that no viewing platform can give them.

Ways to support the dig teams

Volunteer with a community excavation through local heritage groups, especially during the May to September field season.
Visit the smaller, lesser-known ring forts such as Leacanabuaile near Cahersiveen or the unassuming enclosures along the Valencia road.
Attend an open day at an active dig, where finds are displayed and archaeologists answer questions.
Respect marked sites by keeping to paths, leaving stones in place, and reporting any finds to the National Monuments Service.
Buy locally published heritage guides rather than mass-produced guidebooks, so the money stays with the writers and researchers.
Encourage school groups to take part in mock digs run by the heritage education officers of Kerry County Council.
Follow the Skellig Coast online for dig notices, lecture evenings, and oral history recordings as they are released.

If you have ever felt the pull of a place whose past is older than any map, the ring forts of the Iveragh Peninsula are waiting. Pack a raincoat, sturdy boots, and a willingness to slow down. The coast will do the rest. Drop in at the Skellig Coast visitor information point in Cahersiveen, sign up for a guided walk, or get in touch with the local heritage team to find out where the trowels are pointing next season. The forts have stood for over a thousand years, and they still have stories to tell, especially to anyone willing to kneel in the grass and listen.