Promontory fort - coastal, Baile Mór Thiar, Co. Kerry

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Promontory fort – coastal, Baile Mór Thiar, Co. Kerry

At the southern edge of Ventry Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula, a small finger of land juts out into the water, and on its northern approach someone, at some point in the distant past, dug a ditch and threw up a bank to make it defensible.

The original entrance to this promontory fort has since crumbled into the sea, which gives the place an odd, unresolved quality: a defended threshold that no longer exists, guarding a space you can still walk into by a later, informal path worn down the outer slope of the fosse.

A promontory fort uses natural geography, typically a headland or cliff-edged spit, as part of its defences, requiring artificial barriers only on the landward side. Here, that barrier consists of a single fosse, a defensive ditch, running 20.5 metres across and 3.5 metres wide, paired with a bank of earth and stone that rises between two and 3.8 metres above the ditch on its outer face. The fosse itself slopes, reaching only 1.75 metres deep at its eastern end but dropping to 3 metres at the west. Inside the defences, the enclosed space extends roughly 20 metres southward to the cliff edge, where a later wall with its own internal fosse was added at some subsequent period. In the western part of this interior, a low circular platform about 6 metres across survives, with a shallow central depression that may represent the footprint of a round hut. T. J. Westropp, the antiquarian who surveyed many such sites in the early twentieth century, noted a similar feature on the southeastern edge when he visited in 1910, but nothing of it remains there now. The site goes by no recorded local name of its own, though the nearby place-names Fothair na Mná and Faill na Gig, the latter meaning something close to "the woman's cliff," are associated with the surrounding landscape in Irish-language sources, and Westropp used the cliff name to identify the fort's location.

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