Ringfort (Rath), Baile An Mhathamhnaigh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Baile An Mhathamhnaigh, Co. Kerry

On a south-east facing slope in Baile An Mhathamhnaigh, on the Dingle Peninsula, the eastern arc of a once-complete ringfort curves faintly through the grass, its western half long since erased.

When the first Ordnance Survey mapped the area, the full circuit was still visible: a univallate enclosure, meaning a single-banked earthwork, roughly 48 metres across. By the time surveyors returned for the second edition in 1896, half of it had gone.

What survives today is fragmentary but legible to a careful eye. The bank around the eastern half is only faintly discernible now, and there are slight traces of a possible fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the bank to reinforce the enclosure's boundary. A field wall has since been driven east to west across the southern part of the interior, cutting it in two and adding a more recent layer of boundary-making to a site already shaped by centuries of land use. On either side of that wall, low mounds have formed, and to the south there is a depression approximately 8 metres in diameter and 0.6 metres deep. This hollow may mark the position of a former hut site, or possibly a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage common in early medieval Ireland, sometimes used for storage or refuge. The site lies about 125 metres east of another recorded monument on the same landscape, suggesting this part of the peninsula was once relatively densely settled. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne area, which covers the Dingle Peninsula, recorded the site as no. 615, and it remains one of many quiet remnants distributed across a coastline where early medieval farming communities left their marks in earth and stone before later agriculture gradually reclaimed the ground.

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