Mound, Rathmorrel, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
In the townland of Rathmorrel in north Kerry, a circular enclosure that was legible enough to be mapped by Ordnance Survey cartographers in 1842 has since been reduced to little more than a suggestion in the ground.
A north-to-south track cuts through what was once a defined boundary, and the interior, where two depressions sit in the northern sector, offers only faint clues as to what the space once held. At the centre of it all, a small mound measuring roughly 2.4 metres by 3 metres survives, modest in scale but conspicuous enough to have been recorded separately from the enclosure around it.
Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, often the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was widespread from the early medieval period onwards. Their earthen banks and interior features, including storage pits, post holes, and ancillary mounds, once organised the domestic and agricultural life of farming families. The fact that this particular enclosure still appeared on the 1916 Ordnance Survey map, some seven decades after it was first recorded, suggests its earthworks remained reasonably intact well into the twentieth century. The levelling that has since occurred reflects a pattern common across Ireland, where ringforts and similar monuments were gradually lost to agricultural improvement and land use change. C. Toal documented the site in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, by which point the damage was already evident.