Ringfort (Rath), Ballintermon, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballintermon, Co. Kerry

What makes this particular ringfort worth pausing over is not the earthwork itself, though it is a decent specimen, but what a mechanical excavator accidentally punched through in 1979: a souterrain, the kind of underground stone-built passage and chamber complex that early medieval Irish farmers sometimes constructed beneath or beside their homesteads, probably for storage and concealment.

The rath sits on level pasture land near a small tributary of the Owenascaul river on the Dingle Peninsula, and another rath stands roughly 150 metres to the south in the same field, suggesting this was once a quietly busy patch of early medieval settlement.

The enclosing bank of the ringfort, a univallate rath, meaning it has a single earthen rampart rather than the multiple concentric rings found at higher-status sites, measures up to 1.7 metres in height and was originally faced on its inner side with continuous drystone masonry. That revetment has largely collapsed, though traces survive at a few points. The outer ditch, visible on older Ordnance Survey maps, has been filled in entirely, and the bank has been cut back in places. A clochaun, a small dry-stone corbelled hut, was noted inside the enclosure by a researcher in 1954, but no trace of it remains today. The souterrain exposed by the excavator in 1979 turned out to be roughly L-shaped in plan, with two rectangular chambers connected by a creepway so tight, at 45 centimetres wide and 58 centimetres high at its porthole entrance, that an adult would have to wriggle through on hands and knees. The inner chamber, which escaped the worst of the machinery damage, is roofed by four large stone slabs over slightly corbelled walls and retains two drainage channels at its base. Most intriguingly, a fragment of a millstone was recovered from the rubble of the damaged outer chamber, suggesting the stone had been built into the wall at some point, perhaps reused from an earlier structure or simply to hand when repairs were needed.

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