Ringfort (Rath), Ballyledder, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Beneath this roughly circular earthwork on the northern foothills of Cloghfaunaglibbaun mountain, a hidden passageway stretches nearly eighteen metres into the ground, branching into four stone-lined chambers that have not been entered in living memory.
The site goes by at least two Irish names, Lispadrickmore and Lissbaunbalia, and it is the souterrain, an underground structure of drystone construction used in early medieval Ireland for storage, refuge, or both, that gives it its particular character. At the turn of the twentieth century you could still climb down through an opening near the centre of the enclosure and crawl through narrow connecting passages into corbelled chambers averaging just over a metre wide and under two metres high. By the late 1970s a second entrance had been identified near what may have been the original gateway. Today neither opening is apparent.
When a surveyor named Cooke examined the site in 1906, he found both defensive banks already damaged, though the outer one still rose to about five feet. That outer bank has since been levelled entirely. What remains is primarily the inner earthen bank, which survives most substantially at the south-west, where it rises 3.1 metres above the base of the flat-bottomed fosse, the defensive ditch between the two banks, and drops nearly two metres down to the interior. The fosse itself, measuring 1.5 metres wide and 0.8 metres deep at its best-preserved points in the south and south-west, fades to faint traces elsewhere. The enclosure is bivallate, meaning it originally had two concentric banks and ditches, a form associated with higher-status settlements. A modern fence now follows the southern arc of the inner bank, and a wide gap at the north-west, nearly seven and a half metres across, may mark where the entrance once stood. The interior, roughly thirty metres across, slopes gently down toward the south-east, opening onto broad views over the low-lying plains south of the River Laune.