Ringfort (Rath), Tubrid More, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tubrid More, Co. Kerry

Half of this ringfort no longer exists, and most of what remains has been deliberately levelled.

What survives at Tubrid More is, by any measure, a diminished thing, yet it still repays attention precisely because of how clearly it shows the pressures that have shaped, and reshaped, Ireland's early medieval landscape over many centuries.

A rath is an enclosure, typically circular, formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or place of shelter. This example is univallate, meaning it had a single enclosing bank rather than the layered defences found at more elaborate sites. Its internal diameter runs to roughly 26.7 metres east to west, a modest but not unusual scale. At some point a fieldbank was constructed across the northern sector, running northeast to southwest, and everything north of that boundary has since disappeared entirely. The remaining southern arc of bank is around five metres wide at its base, sitting just 0.6 metres above the interior on one side and 0.9 metres above the exterior on the other. Those are slight differences in elevation, but they are enough to trace the original circuit. What makes the site particularly stark is that even this remnant was substantially levelled, apparently sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s, leaving the interior at roughly the same height as the surrounding farmland.

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