Ringfort (Rath), Gortalassa, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Gortalassa, Co. Kerry

In the level pasture above the Roughty River in south-west Kerry, a circular earthen bank rises quietly out of the grass, and somewhere near its centre, a passageway goes underground.

That combination is ordinary enough for this part of Ireland, but what sets this particular rath apart is a stone circle that was recorded here in the 1940s and has since, by all appearances, ceased to exist.

The ringfort itself is a fairly typical example of the form: a raised, roughly circular enclosure measuring about 36 metres east to west and 32 metres north to south, with an earthen bank that stands around 2.5 metres above the exterior ground level. A rath of this kind would have served as a farmstead enclosure during the early medieval period, the bank offering a degree of security and a clear boundary around domestic and agricultural activity. Near the centre of the interior lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was often used for storage or as a refuge, a feature found in many Irish ringforts. What complicates the picture here is a record from the 1940s, compiled by what was then known as the Irish Tourist Association, describing a stone circle of about fifteen stones with a diameter of roughly 35 feet sitting inside the rath. No trace of any such arrangement survives today. The current assessment is that the feature was probably not a stone circle in the prehistoric ceremonial sense at all, but more likely some kind of enclosure whose stones have since been removed or dispersed. It is the kind of misidentification that was not uncommon in mid-twentieth-century fieldwork, when the vocabulary of monument types was applied with less precision than later survey work would bring.

The bank is partly bounded to the north by a road and to the north-north-east by a farm trackway, so the site sits in an actively farmed landscape. The entrance to the enclosure faces roughly east-south-east, and there is a gap in the bank at the opposite side, towards the west-south-west.

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Pete F
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