Ringfort (Rath), Keelties, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Keelties, Co. Kerry

Between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of it, half of a Kerry ringfort apparently vanished, at least on paper.

The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a complete circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across at Keelties, but by the 1894 edition the cartographers recorded only the southern half. The earthwork itself had not disappeared; what shifted was either the surveyors' attention or the visible condition of the monument on the ground.

What survives today is a raised, roughly subcircular platform set in pasture on level ground, measuring approximately twenty-eight metres on its northwest to southeast axis and twenty-five metres across the other way. A rath, to use the Irish term, is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, a form of settlement that was widespread across Ireland from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. Here, the enclosing works take slightly different forms depending on where you look: a scarp, a near-vertical cut edge rising around eighty-five centimetres, defines the northern to southeastern arc, while a proper earthen bank, about a metre and a half wide, carries the line around from the southeast to the west. The northwest quadrant is cut across by a later field boundary running roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, which has obscured or absorbed that section of the original enclosure. Outside the bank to the south and west, a fosse, the ditch that would originally have deepened the defensive effect of the bank above it, runs about two metres wide and a metre deep, though furze has grown thickly over it. A broad gap in the bank on the southeastern arc is likely where the original entrance once stood. At the centre of the enclosure, there may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage that typically served early medieval farmsteads as a place of storage or refuge.

The furze obscuring the fosse and the field boundary cutting through the northwest are the two features most worth noting if you visit. The bank on the southeastern side, where the possible entrance gap sits, gives the clearest sense of the original structure's scale and intention.

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