Ringfort (Rath), Baile Na Leacan, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Baile Na Leacan, Co. Kerry

What survives at Baile Na Leacan is only half a ringfort, and the reason it is half a ringfort is almost certainly a lane.

The earthwork sits on the lower eastern slopes of Brandon Mountain, pressing against the southern edge of a local road, and the suspicion among those who have studied it is that the northern portion of what was once a complete circular enclosure was simply removed when that lane was cut through the landscape. What remains is a semi-circular platform, rising 3.5 metres on its downslope southeastern side while sitting virtually flush with the surrounding ground on its northwestern edge, a shape that only makes sense if you imagine the missing arc. Loose stones along the densely overgrown perimeter may be the tumbled remnants of an enclosing wall or a stone-revetted bank, the kind of boundary that would once have defined the rath clearly against the hillside.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosed settlement of early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead by a family of some local standing. This one measures roughly 28 metres east to west and just over 14 metres north to south across its surviving upper surface. It is recorded as "Fort" on the Fair Plan, the nineteenth-century valuation maps used to document landholdings across Ireland. J. Cuppage documented the site in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, and the picture has been complicated slightly by a note made earlier by the writer and folklorist Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha, who published under the pen name An Seabhac. In a 1939 publication he mentioned a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage sometimes associated with early medieval ringforts and used variously for storage or refuge, somewhere in this townland. Three ringforts are known in the area, and it has never been established which of the three he meant.

The platform looks out across the Owenmore valley and Brandon Bay towards the central mountain ridge of the Dingle Peninsula, a view that would have made the site useful for anyone keeping watch over movement through the valley below. A field wall now runs along the eastern edge, folding the ancient earthwork into the later geometry of agricultural land division, so that the ringfort has effectively been absorbed into the working landscape around it, half-hidden and half-erased.

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