Fortification, Drombeg, Co. Kerry

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Military Buildings

Fortification, Drombeg, Co. Kerry

In the North Kerry landscape near Drombeg, a long earthen bank rises to just over two metres, tapers at both ends, and disappears quietly into the surrounding fields.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1841 to 1842, and again from 1939, mark the spot plainly as "Garrison (in ruins)", which is itself a small piece of cartographic honesty. Whatever strategic purpose once animated the place, what remains today is a rectangular raised enclosure, a surviving outer bank running roughly north-east to south-west for 57 metres, and a shallow fosse, a defensive ditch, measuring less than half a metre deep. Field fences have cut across the eastern and south-south-eastern banks, largely destroying them, and the interior holds a large depression some six by nine metres across, its original function unrecorded.

The double bank on the western to north-western side, and the incurve cut into the bank roughly 22 metres from its north-western end, suggest a structure designed with some care for defence. The connection to Listowel, a few kilometres away, places this in a recognisable political moment. On 23 April 1659, during a period of acute anxiety about the security of English-held Ireland, a list was drawn up naming Listowel as one of the garrisons to be held in the event of invasion, with forty men proposed for its defence. That document, cited by J. A. Gaughan in 1973, points to the town's perceived importance as a strategic position in north Kerry during the mid-seventeenth century. The earthworks at Drombeg may well be part of the wider infrastructure that made such garrison thinking possible, a field fortification in the orbit of a garrisoned town rather than a grand installation in its own right.

The site today is embedded in agricultural land, and the intrusion of later field boundaries has done considerable damage to its coherence. The outer bank retains enough height externally to read as a deliberate construction, and the raised interior platform is still visible as a distinct feature in the landscape. What survives is fragmentary but legible, the kind of earthwork that rewards attention from someone already inclined to look.

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Pete F
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