Ringfort (Rath), Baile An Phléamannaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Most ringforts announce themselves with some confidence, their earthen banks rising clearly from the surrounding landscape.
This one, on the low-lying ground near Trabeg on the Dingle Peninsula, does the opposite. It has subsided, been absorbed, and partly reassigned, its eastern bank now doing quiet duty as a field boundary, overlaid in places by a stone wall that belongs to an entirely different era of land management. A rath, to use the Irish term, was a circular enclosure of raised earth used typically in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or defended homestead, and this example retains the basic form while offering very little of the drama.
The enclosure measures roughly 18.4 metres north to south and 20.4 metres east to west internally, dimensions that suggest a modest but not unusually small settlement. It is univallate, meaning it had a single enclosing bank rather than the double or triple rings that indicate higher-status sites. That eastern section, now incorporated into a north-south field fence, reaches a maximum height of 1.4 metres, but around much of the remaining circuit the bank barely clears half a metre above the interior. At the southern arc, there is a faint external fosse, the shallow ditch that would once have reinforced the bank as a defensive or demarcating feature, now reduced to something approximately 1.5 metres wide and only a few centimetres deep. The survey on which this description draws, J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region of the Dingle Peninsula, recorded the site as poorly preserved even then, which gives a reasonable indication of its trajectory over the decades since.