Ringfort (Rath), Ballinillane, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballinillane, Co. Kerry

On a hilltop plateau in Ballinillane, County Kerry, a ringfort sits in open pasture with half of it effectively erased.

What survives is not the tidy circular enclosure that once existed but a semicircle, the eastern portion gone entirely, absorbed into or simply destroyed by the field boundary that now runs straight down the site's eastern edge.

A rath, as ringforts of this type are known, was typically a circular enclosed farmstead of early medieval Ireland, its bank and ditch marking out a domestic and agricultural territory rather than any strictly military one. Ordnance Survey maps from 1846 and 1894 both record this particular example as a complete circular enclosure of roughly 40 metres in diameter, so its eastern half was still traceable, at least as a landscape feature, into the late nineteenth century. What remains today on the western arc is a stone-faced earthen bank, 5.4 metres wide, rising about 1.3 metres on the interior side and just under two metres on the exterior, with a slight fosse, or defensive ditch, running along the outer south-western arc. Two gaps in the bank, one at the south roughly three metres wide and one at the north slightly wider, likely mark original entrances or later breaks. A further field boundary extends outward from the western arc, suggesting the enclosure was methodically parcelled into farmland over the centuries, the straight lines of agricultural convenience gradually winning out over the curved logic of the original structure.

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Pete F
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