Mound, Banna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At Banna in north County Kerry, what remains of an ancient enclosed settlement is only partially legible in the landscape, and that incompleteness is itself part of what makes it worth attention.
Field boundaries have cut so deeply into the site from several directions that what survives of the enclosing earthen bank runs only from north around to the south-east, leaving a pronounced arc shape where a full circuit once stood. Sitting within that arc are two oblong mounds, set apart from one another, neither immediately explained by the surviving remains around them.
The enclosure is a univallate rath, meaning a roughly circular earthwork defined by a single bank and ditch, a form of enclosed farmstead common across Ireland from the early medieval period. The surviving bank still describes enough of its original curve to suggest the scale of what stood here. One mound sits just inside the entrance to the rath interior, while a second lies roughly nine metres to the south-west, oriented east to west, measuring approximately ten and a half metres long, two and a half metres wide, and just over a metre high. These internal mounds within raths are not always easily interpreted; they may represent the remains of structures, souterrains (underground stone-lined passages sometimes used for storage or refuge), or earlier activity on the site pre-dating the enclosure itself. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site in the condition described, with the enclosure already compromised by later agricultural boundaries that had been pushed through its southern and western sides.
