Ringfort (Rath), Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Derrygorman, Co. Kerry

Two ringforts sitting less than three metres apart is unusual enough to make any field archaeologist pause.

At Derrygorman in County Kerry, this is precisely what you find: a pair of subcircular univallate raths, meaning single-banked earthwork enclosures of the kind built across Ireland broadly between the early medieval period and the early centuries of the first millennium, set so close together on a south-facing slope that the question of whether they were ever simultaneously occupied, and by whom, feels genuinely open.

The ringfort described here is the southernmost of the two, roughly 22 metres across in both directions. Its enclosing bank stands about 1.5 metres high on the outside and around a metre on the interior face, with short stretches of drystone walling still visible at three points along the inner flank, though this stonework rises no higher than 45 centimetres. The most plausible original entrance is a 2.5-metre gap on the western side, now partly blocked by a low mound of earth and stone. A further ringfort, recorded separately as Lismore, lies less than 100 metres to the east, which makes this a notably dense concentration of enclosures for a single hillside. Inside the rath, a series of low stony mounds were once interpreted as the remains of five houses, though the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey published by J. Cuppage in 1986 argues that only three of them can reasonably be read that way. Two of those probable structures appear to have been joined to each other, and the eastern one measures just 3.6 metres by 3 metres internally, suggesting modest domestic use. A further mound near the south-east may represent the western wall of a house that was built directly against the ringfort bank itself, using the enclosure's own earthwork as one of its walls.

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