Ringfort (Rath), Ballyhar, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
A low grassy swell in a Kerry pasture field, barely perceptible from the road that skirts its eastern edge, this ringfort survives more as a suggestion than a monument.
A rath, as these early medieval enclosures are commonly known, was typically a circular earthen bank enclosing a farmstead, the defended home of a single family or small community, probably dating to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries. Here, the defining bank runs clearest along the north-northwest to north-northeast arc, rising just over a metre above the exterior ground level, while elsewhere the boundary fades to an intermittent scarp. The interior, measuring roughly 32 metres east to west, dips slightly, a concavity that is characteristic of long-settled and then abandoned enclosures.
What lends this particular site its quiet interest is the company it keeps in the landscape. In the 1840s, surveyors working on the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the parish of Kilcredane noted two raths at the western end of the Ballyhar townland, and placed them in proximity to a children's burial ground. These burial grounds, known in Irish as cillíní, were unconsecrated plots where unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial were interred, often on the margins of older, pre-Christian sites. The association between raths and cillíní is not uncommon across Ireland; the perceived antiquity and separateness of ringforts made them natural candidates for such liminal uses. The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map confirms the enclosure's presence, marking it as a circular feature of approximately 30 metres in diameter. The children's burial ground recorded in connection with these raths lies around 170 metres to the southeast, close enough to suggest the relationship described by those earlier observers was a real and deliberate one.