Barrow (Ring Barrow), Gortanahaneboy, Co. Kerry

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Barrow (Ring Barrow), Gortanahaneboy, Co. Kerry

In a pasture field on a south-east-facing slope in Gortanahaneboy, a small circular earthwork sits quietly beneath a tangle of overgrowth and coniferous trees, its southern bank long since absorbed into an ordinary field boundary.

It is a ring-barrow, a type of funerary monument dating from the Bronze Age, consisting of a low central mound or platform enclosed by a circular ditch, known as a fosse, and an outer earthen bank. This one is modest in scale, roughly 6.5 metres across, with a causeway entrance at the south just two metres wide. The Paps of Dana, the twin rounded hills to the south associated in folklore with the goddess Danu, are visible from the site, a sightline that may or may not be coincidental but is difficult to dismiss entirely.

The monument measures roughly 6.5 metres across its interior, with the enclosing fosse about 1.5 metres wide and the external bank standing nearly a metre high on its outer face. A second ring-barrow lies approximately 20 metres to the south-west, suggesting this part of the Kerry landscape was once meaningful enough to attract repeated burial activity. By the 1940s, the earthwork was recorded in the Schools Manuscript collection, a nationwide folklore-gathering project in which schoolchildren documented local knowledge, as a feature on Michael Kelliher's land, referred to there by the diminutive Irish term lisín, meaning a small fort or enclosure. The word reflects how such ancient monuments were often reinterpreted across the centuries, absorbed into the folklore of fairy forts and sacred ground rather than recognised for what archaeology would later identify them as.

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