 So I'm going to speak about Castle and Munster, which is a site I've been working on for quite a long time and still haven't really figured out. And it's the capital of the kingdom of Munster. And from around about the late 7th century, its kings thought of themselves as kings of Ireland and challenged for that on the national scale. So it's quite an important site. It's also very different from the other kind of equivalent sites that we have in Ireland. So Munster is one of supposedly five provinces. So these are the major overking ships in Ireland, which the king of Ireland supposedly a king over all of these provinces. So not really anything realised in reality till around about the 10th century AD. The capitals of these other provinces all tend to be prehistoric ceremonial centres. So places of cult and perhaps rulership in the Iron Age, up to the late hours of the 4th to 5th century AD, that then come in from around about the end of the 8th century started, the 9th century they start to be referred to as Royal Centre, the capitals of these provinces. The main point to point out about this is that these places are very very different. These are prehistoric complexes that have some evidence of medieval activity. And Castle, as soon as you look at it, is very different. It's a large rock outcrop, much more akin to the sites that Gordon was talking about in Scotland. And it's occupied by a whole host of late medieval buildings, which none of these are early medieval. These are all kind of 1100 and later up to the 15th and 16th centuries. But so straight away that means that the types of authority that we might look to see manufactured and negotiated at Castle are going to be quite different from the types of authority that we would see at those other prehistoric provincial centres in Ireland and the sort of institution of sacred kingship that people like Conor Newman and others have started to develop ideas for and explore in recent centuries. And in terms of understanding the position of Castle in its development, key to it is understanding its role in the politics of developing an over-kingship of Munster and, indeed, control of that polity through the period and the aspirations of kings of Castle to be kings of Ireland on the national scale. So this is a kind of a very conjectural but general model for how I would see the main qualities developing in Munster through the kind of 500 to 700, 800 AD period. The key point is that the kings that control Castle and the people we can associate with it, they control different territories through the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries and they more or less expanded their control as they could throughout the province. And that's the point at which they started to look north and try and control the island. The major thing to say though is that even within that, if we can see regional kingdoms within an over-kingship of Munster, there's probably about 90, if not more localised kingdoms on a very small scale, the kind of re-too-head that Nick was talking about, of very small territories that maintain some semblance of autonomy right into the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. And that's the big difficulty with studying Ireland. It's trying to see how that regional scale of over-kingship on the one hand operates when it's underpinned by very localised and seemingly autonomous scales of localised kingship. So the kings that are associated with Castle are called the Oganachta, but in reality the Oganachta is this confederacy of dynasties that are spread throughout the province that aren't in any way related but we're actually competing groups against each other for control of the wider region and the wider kind of southern sphere of Ireland through much of the period. And around about the period 670 to 700 they coalesce together into confederacy that subsumes the previously too powerful ones, the Carcoligda and the Eva-Claro. And essentially these two main groups gave rise to a whole host of different dynasties scattered throughout the province that controlled the majority of the territory. So that's kind of the historical background. In terms of archaeology, Castle is very different to these other centres in Ireland and it's always posed a problem because of that. It doesn't really have a prehistoric archaeology and for the last 10 years of people or 20 years or so people have kind of assumed that once we start survey and excavation we'll actually start to find that prehistoric element that it must be there because that's what Irish kingship looks like. But it's not really after a whole host of geophysics and looking at lidar surveys. There's not much prehistoric evidence from it. There's a limited amount of artefacts from say the first to 56 centuries AD from either on the rock itself or from the immediate hinterland. This is the only object that predates about 500 from the rock itself. It's a fibula that was found in 19th century rubble, sorry in rubble in the late 19th century. And even in road schemes for developer-led projects around Castle there seems to be a gap between around about the first century AD and the second half of the fifth century at the earliest. So there seems to be relatively good evidence that from around about the 56 centuries that's when Castle really starts to become important. Another kind of tangible aspect to this is that Castle is one of the few places of power and royal power in the 50th and 10th century Ireland where we have very little evidence for concrete evidence for churches within the landscapes around. So there's actually no certain church site within the what we might think of as the royal domain or the core royal landscape around Castle. There's some place names and sites that might be associated with churches but none of these are secure have evidence for kind of ecclesiastical archaeology or even a test of ecclesiastical functions before maybe the 13th or 14th centuries. We do however have churches out around the royal domain that kill more, clean fin glass, tourine and urrie which we know were patronized and founded by Kings of Castle in the 6th and 7th centuries AD. So they weren't non-Christian by any means but for some reason the landscape of Castle is different and that might be to do with the fact that Castle its very name means a fortified place. It's derived from the Latin Castellum so it seems to be a site that is in some way defended or intended to be defended from its very inception. Now it changes in how it functions. Identifying the archaeological component of that defended element or the bit that's inherent in the name Castle itself is inordinately difficult because Castle remains a site of activity right to the present day. So there is a town that developed in the late medieval period and a rock itself became an archipiscule sea in 1101 when it was granted to the church. So that means that all the beautiful buildings that crowned the rock itself were probably constructed from materials quarried from the the outcrop or the crag of the the rock itself. So when you go around looking for any archaeological evidence any hints of it seem to have been quarried to bits or they might just be the results of quarrying them. So for instance we have large sections of ditch that seem to perhaps create terraces on the northern bases where we have large artistic blocks that might be placed at the top of these terraces. These could be defensive or they could just be large pieces of limestone that were quarried in the 19th century even in the late medieval period to build a cathedral. Until we maybe see about sticking some trenches into it we won't know for certain. There is however definite attempts to heighten the natural terracing of the northern base so we can see a rubble wall here that stands on top of a kind of a four meter high wall face so it's a bit superfluous unless you're trying to heighten the impressiveness of the wall face on the north. So possibly there's evidence or at least a kind of a smoke and gun that there's some attempt at fortifying the rock in the the early medieval period. On the northeastern corner there's a very large rock cut gorge again possibly from quarrying in the last the recent thousand years at any point really we don't know but it could also be some form of entranceway because it gives access to the very top northeastern corner inside the present summit enclosure where we have this ditched feature that looks like it could possibly be a ditch around the summit of Denol and then on the northeastern corner too we have these banks that we can see in aerial photographs that seem to suggest two phases of activity here that might again be evidence for enclosures or activities on the rock. On the western faces no matter what we do photogrammetry lidar data it's really really badly quarried but again there's a hint of tourism there's a hint of some banks and ditches possible enclosures that might be related to fortifications or that kind of primary phase of activity but really really difficult to to see. That picture is is complicated then by geophysics and some very recent excavation where so there's been about about 30 hectares of different methods of geophysics done around the rock so quite a substantial area. The thing that's missing is prehistoric archaeology there's none really there as far as we can see but there is a lot a lot of evidence that we don't know what date it is so some of the really interesting features that come up is this large kind of L shaped enclosure which has a barrel at the center of it and possibly some form of feature palaces interior to it here maybe another enclosure here and then here we have a large curvilinear ditch and another one here that seemed like there might be outer enclosures on the southern side of the rock as well as this later feature that looks like some sort of avenue and these linear features that maybe are dividing up space between those two enclosing features. So initially I'd hope that these might be these enclosures on the southern side might turn out to be early medieval and some of them might yet but it's proved quite difficult to try and find any early medieval archaeology at cash despite its importance and significance. So in July we opened up a trench across and the feature that we see here on the left and lo and behold we got loads and loads of animal bone and 12th and 13th century artifacts and there might be some very very optimistic evidence of a of a recut that the artifacts artifactual evidence including the 13th century pottery comes from with some animal bone that we got from below that recut so we might yet find an early medieval date for that but I wouldn't hold out much hope. So again that kind of puts puts some difficulty in trying to trying to clarify the nature of activity at cash on the nature of that early phase but hopefully further work over the next couple of years will help to help to address it. So the big problem that cashon faces is not just that the rock itself put in the wider landscape issues of date there's been very little excavation very little study of the landscape around it so anything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt that I might say in the next few minutes. What we do have though is a whole series of very very large enclosures on the southern southern side of cashon that maybe are defending it from that polity that I've talked about earlier that seems to be based the south and then the southwest of monster so we can see one here one here and one here large bivalent or sorry trivalent and quadrivalent enclosures on hilltops to the south that seem to demarcate in a very impressive fashion and a major royal place. Those enclosures to my mind the scale of them suggested they're amongst a very early group of multi-valent enclosures and are in maybe fifth or sixth centuries but again that's that's to be to be verified by by excavation then we have lots and lots of ring forts which are that kind of classic early medieval settlement type in actually the fact that it's one of the largest concentrations of ring forts within the landscape around cash there's a huge amount of them that are early medieval settlement enclosures and we know from recent work that these are likely to have been constructed in the period 600 to 850. The scale of them and the number of them makes it quite quite interesting to think about quite as so many of them within this landscape and one of the kind of tentative suggestions that I would make is that they actually seem to cluster around those earlier larger enclosures that suggest that maybe they formed the foci of settlement clusters and that that is perhaps a manifestation of the the rule of a royal place and the kind of materialization of a royal court. Partly that's because some of the place names around cash and seem to contain and the names of lineages that are based around monster or polities around the south of Ireland that were controlled by the kings of cash and controlled by the kings of monsters. So Rakhmakartig for the muskriga, Baliejuik these are a lineage of the karkaligda and the leoton or the lion and then some of the place names of these large settlement enclosures seem to imply some level of hierarchy so dignity honoring the place names although Nick might have different different different ideas there so possibly this is actually the kind of the gifting of places within the royal domain within the royal landscape to retain our kings or our subject kings within the the control of these of these people. Burial evidence very very slight there is two single burials from the entirety of the road scheme around cashel and there's very few barrels from the the royal domain itself there is however about four burial likely burial monuments on the western and northwestern faces of the the rock itself so there might be a funerary element but there's no necessary implication to that as any as any prehistoric element there is a relatively good argument that can be made for inauguration and cashel is actually only one of two sites that we have concrete evidence for the for complex inauguration rituals cashel and tyra in the entirety of Ireland there's a lot of evidence for inauguration but it actually comes from a late medieval context possibly that ritual is is centered on this avenue and the dove ploy which is a long sunken linear avenue that winds its way from the northeast towards the rock and along it's northeastern north northern face so we can see it here with two big turns and then it expands and peter's out here on the northwestern face where it starts we have a low platform mound that you can see here so as you approach cashel from the northeast this is the first time you can actually see the rock of cashel itself which is this kind of looks like an extension to the ridge but it's actually a freestanding outcrop. I did some geophysics a good number of years ago to show that this does actually extend along the northern face and there's a little kink that seems to be purposefully just to to incorporate one of those four barrels that are on the western north western faces and then only a few hundred meters away from this in beside another barrel is this beautiful sixth century panannular road that came from a little pit stuck into the top of the barrel monument. On the top of the rock itself an inauguration ritual probably culminated and we have texts that refer to that refer to inauguration furniture and likely give the the dicta used in the inauguration of a king and we also have a reference to a church which is a royal church possibly the first royal church built at any of the major royal sites in Ireland and this has been excavated in the early 1990s by by Brian Hodgkinson. It probably dates to the reign of Phaedlemine McRiven in the first half well second quarter of the the 9th century and he actually held ecclesiastical office at Deryn Aflan where the Deryn Aflan chalice that you see here is and is just a few miles to the northeast of Catterton so possibly actually that comes from that sort of period of patronage. The church itself seems to suggest some sort of ecclesiastically orientated recomposition of the summit of the rock in the start of the the 9th century and possibly a more vocally ecclesiastical or christian office of kingship developing at that point because we also have a cross fragment that is also 9th century eddy and dave from the summit of the rock although it was found in early 20th century rubble again and in terms of what we know about the rest of the rock we know there's some burial from probably around about the 9th century associated with the church. He used some of these early burials excavated outside karmic's chapel and an excavation by Kon Manning uncovered a wall about two meters wide that predates the 15th century but we have no other concrete evidence for it otherwise but it looks possibly like it might actually be an early wall possibly around the summit of the knoll. In geophysics on the summit we found a circular feature here that looks like it's a rubbed out cairn with a stone feature at the center of it that might be a kiss possibly related or in some way to a reference in late 7th century text though an early king of castle that says he was buried facing north and under the couch of the king's home the re at cash so possibly that's explaining why it's in the northeastern corner but also with a north south orientated cyst. And then the final state of inauguration seems to have been at this site about two kilometers to the south-west of the rock at Ronnie yearning which is almost certainly Balonry Ballynery the place of the king and this lovely quadrival of forts that you see down here. Immediately to the north of this is a complex here at Raccoon where we have the largest baroque cemetery in the entire landscape a whole five barrows that are about four meters in diameter each they're tiny and contained within a small rectangular enclosure and there's a possibility of a craft mark here that might be in some way connected to but this is the site at which kings of castle were proclaimed by the by the the people who performed the inauguration ceremony and the people who proclaimed the king they seemed to have controlled the territory that immediately started right here so they actually owned this land immediately below Balonry and this is the site that in an origin for castle and castle is revealed to the swine herds of the king of monster probably in this area here so they return to this site at the end of an inauguration ritual and they get proclaimed they get their genealogy recited and then they get instructed in this fashion with this passage at the end here arise and proceed in safety journey in safety your royal power is more right than a druid surpassing a testament surpassing a fire and death and Dennis Casey is actually suggested that this is the final stage of telak which was a legal sacrament for taking possession of land that involved a whole series of rituals but the final one of which was circumambulation perhaps in this case of the royal domain itself or of the royal estate that the king took upon inauguration and so castle is a really problematic site it's one that is probably the most significant site if not the second most significant site after Tyra and Ireland but one that's poorly served in terms of our archaeological knowledge of it and hopefully that'll develop over the next couple of years as we get farther into the project these are some people who've helped along the way and given access to land and and been really really helpful so I'll leave it at that and I shall pass over to Russell