Minard Head, An Mhín Aird Thiar, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Forts
On the tip of a long, narrow headland on the Kerry coast, something cuts across the ridge about one hundred metres from the end: a wide earthen bank and an external fosse, the kind of ditch-and-rampart arrangement that suggests someone, at some point, wanted to separate that final sliver of land from everything behind it.
Whether it was defensive, territorial, or ceremonial is not recorded. The structure simply sits there, dividing the headland from its own extremity.
The feature was noted by Casey in 2002, who described the headland as ridge-backed and remarked that it appeared to have been deliberately cut off near its tip by this earthwork. The fosse, a ditch dug to reinforce the bank on its outer face, is a common element in promontory forts, a class of enclosure found widely along the Irish coastline in which a naturally defensible spur of land is made more secure by blocking off the landward approach. The sea does much of the work on three sides; the bank and ditch handle the rest. Whether that is the correct interpretation here remains open, since the site had not been formally visited or surveyed at the time Casey was writing, which means the promontory fort classification is provisional rather than confirmed.
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