Ringfort (Rath), An Droim Thiar, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Along the western flank of Drom Hill, a low ridge separating Brandon Bay from the estuaries of the Owenmore, Scorid, and Glennahoo rivers, a modern field wall cuts clean through a prehistoric enclosure, dividing it as matter-of-factly as if it were a paddock.
This is one of five ringforts clustered on the same hillside, and it is the kind of site that rewards patience and a certain tolerance for overgrowth. What survives is fragmentary but legible to anyone willing to read the landscape carefully.
The rath, as this type of earthwork enclosure is known, was originally bivallate, meaning it was defended by two concentric banks with a fosse, or ditch, between them. The interior diameter was approximately 24 metres. Where the remains are best preserved, in the southern quadrant on the south-west side of the intruding field wall, the inner bank still stands around 0.8 metres in height internally and drops 1.4 metres to the base of a fosse measuring 2.5 metres across at its base. The outer bank reaches 1.4 metres internally, though only 0.3 metres on its exterior face. Much of the rest has been either absorbed into the field boundary or reduced to a scarp 1.8 metres high. The site also contained a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with storage or refuge in early medieval Ireland. Within living memory it was still possible to enter it; now all that marks its location is a rectangular depression measuring roughly 2 metres by 1.8 metres and 1.1 metres deep, pressed against the inner edge of the inner bank, with fragments of its original drystone walling still visible at the edges. The survey documentation compiled by J. Cuppage for the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey, published in 1986, recorded the monument in this condition, already heavily modified and densely vegetated.