Ringfort (Rath), Scarteen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
The most intriguing detail about this ringfort near Scarteen is not what survives but what was once reported to lie beneath it.
An early Ordnance Survey notebook described the site simply as a 'fort having a cave in it', a note that raises more questions than it answers and for which no further elaboration seems to exist in the record. The cave, whatever form it took, is no longer mentioned among the visible features. What remains is a raised circular platform, roughly thirty metres across and rising to about a metre and a third above the surrounding ground, sitting on a low scarp just east of a tributary of the Blackwater river in south Kerry.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when they relied on earthen banks rather than stone, were the most common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as farmsteads for a single family and their livestock. This one conforms broadly to that pattern, though the cave reference hints at the possibility of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes built beneath or adjacent to ringforts and used for storage or concealment. The outer ditch, or fosse, that would originally have encircled the platform has almost entirely disappeared; only a shallow depression on the western side, about two metres wide and thirty centimetres deep, indicates it was ever there. Coniferous trees now line the southeastern arc of the enclosure, and a stone field boundary has been built up against that same sector, both of which are the kinds of quiet encroachments that accumulate around monuments over centuries of agricultural use. The site appears on both the first and second editions of the Ordnance Survey maps, which places its recorded presence in the landscape back to at least the nineteenth century.