Ringfort (Rath), An Rinn Bhuí, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), An Rinn Bhuí, Co. Kerry

In the broad valley around Trabeg on the Dingle Peninsula, a ringfort sits with two small, roughly coffin-shaped pits at its centre that nobody has yet satisfactorily explained.

A rath, as these earthwork enclosures are known, was typically a circular bank-and-ditch construction used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, enclosing a household and its outbuildings. This one is unusually large, with an internal diameter of nearly 47 metres east to west, placing it well above the common run of such sites. What makes it stranger still is not its size but those two pits in the northern interior, lined partly with drystone masonry, their function entirely unknown.

The enclosing bank is univallate, meaning it has a single circuit rather than the multiple concentric rings found at higher-status sites. It is composed of earth mixed with considerable stone, and it has not survived the centuries undamaged: a field fence cuts across the southern and eastern sectors, two ESB poles were erected inside the western side, and clearance stones have been dumped against the bank, particularly to the east. Where it remains intact, the bank stands about 0.8 metres above the interior surface and 1.1 metres above the exterior ground level. The original entrance has not been identified. The two pits in the north sector measure 1.64 metres and 1.4 metres in length, up to 0.56 metres wide and 0.6 metres deep. A pair of lintels covers the eastern end of the western pit, and one of those lintels is a fragment of a broken millstone, 0.82 metres in diameter with a central perforation of 0.12 metres. This may be a relatively recent improvisation to stop animals from falling in, which says something about how long the pits have been sitting open and unexplained. A separate and equally puzzling find was an irregularly shaped holed stone, roughly 0.54 by 0.58 metres with a perforation 0.24 metres across, discovered resting on top of the field wall that overlies the bank. Its original purpose and placement are unknown. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula.

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