Ringfort (Rath), Ardywanig, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ardywanig, Co. Kerry

There is a ringfort at Ardywanig in County Kerry that you cannot see.

On a north-facing pasture slope with the Slieve Mish Mountains rolling out ahead of you, the ground gives nothing away. The enclosure has been levelled, and what once rose from this hillside as a bivallate rath, that is, a circular settlement enclosed by two concentric earthen banks and ditches, roughly forty metres across, has been reduced entirely to the agricultural flat. It survives now mainly as a mark on the 1894 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where its double rings are still legible as the landscape they once commanded.

What makes the site linger is what lies beneath. In the 1940s, a ringfort locally known as Horgan's fort was inspected in this area, and recorded as containing a great souterrain within its enclosing rings. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically built from stone and used in early medieval Ireland for storage, refuge, or both. The Kerry Field Club noted the structure in 1948, and the souterrain, catalogued separately, presumably still runs below the pasture even as the earthworks above it have vanished. The fort itself was already a ghost by the time anyone wrote it down properly, its above-ground form gone by local account many years before the mid-twentieth-century inspection.

For a visitor, there is little to resolve on the surface. The slope is pasture, the view northward toward the Slieve Mish Mountains is clear, and the absence of the monument is itself the main fact. The interest lies in knowing that the map once described something here, that someone in the 1940s walked the rings and noted the underground chamber below, and that the ground still holds at least part of that.

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Pete F
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