Ringfort (Rath), Cloghera More, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cloghera More, Co. Kerry

Beneath the overgrown interior of this Kerry ringfort, a stone-lined underground passage curves and branches into blocked darkness, and nobody has been able to find the entrance to it for well over a century.

That is the quiet strangeness of this rath in Cloghera More: a structure that was once documented in some detail, then effectively swallowed back into the earth.

The rath sits on a natural rise in pastureland fed by tributaries of the River Laune, in the south of the Iveragh Peninsula. Ringforts of this kind, known in Irish as ráth, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, bounded by one or more earthen banks and ditches to define and protect a domestic space. This one retains a fairly solid bank of stone and earth, averaging about 1.65 metres in external height, with traces of drystone revetting still visible along the northern sector and a probable entrance gap of around 2.3 metres on the western side. The external fosse, a shallow defensive ditch, survives most clearly to the north-east, where it is roughly a metre wide and thirty centimetres deep, though field clearance material piled against the north-western arc has obscured it there. The interior measures roughly 24 metres across. In 1906, a researcher named Cooke managed to access a souterrain from near the centre of the site. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber of drystone construction, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and thought to have served for storage or concealment. The passage Cooke entered ran approximately 4.9 metres in a curving north-east to south-west direction before meeting a blocked passage at its north-western end; another blocked passage extended south-east from the north-eastern end. The side walls were corbelled, meaning the stones were laid so that each course projected slightly inward over the one below, supporting a roof of overlapping slabs. The passage stood less than a metre high at its north-eastern end.

The site is heavily overgrown today, and the point from which Cooke descended into that passage has not been relocated since his visit. The fosse, the bank, and the revetting are still readable in the landscape, but the souterrain beneath remains sealed, its exact position lost under more than a century of vegetation and accumulated field debris.

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