Ringfort (Rath), Baile An Bhogaigh, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Baile An Bhogaigh, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope in Baile An Bhogaigh, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, a roughly oval earthwork quietly divides one field from the next.

To a passing eye it reads as an ordinary boundary, a low bank separating two patches of ground. Look more carefully, and the scale and geometry begin to suggest something older and more deliberate.

What survives here is a univallate rath, a ringfort consisting of a single enclosing earthen bank and an accompanying fosse, the term for the external ditch from which the bank material was typically dug. The internal diameter runs to around 28 metres, a size consistent with a farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, when raths served as the defended homesteads of farming families across Ireland. The long axis of the enclosure runs roughly northeast to southwest, and the Ordnance Survey maps record the full oval outline. In reality, only the northern half of that circuit remains substantially intact, where the bank reaches 2 metres in height and the fosse is preserved to a depth of 1.7 metres and a width of 2.5 metres. The southern arc has been lost, its earthworks levelled at some point in the intervening centuries by the same agricultural pressures that have erased so many similar sites across the country. The surviving northern stretch was recorded in detail by J. Cuppage as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, a region whose density of early medieval and prehistoric monuments is among the highest in Ireland.

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