Ringfort (Rath), Brackloon, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Beneath the dense vegetation on a west-facing slope at the base of Knockafeehane mountain in County Kerry, a small ringfort quietly loses its shape.
What survives of this univallate rath, a single-banked circular enclosure of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period, amounts to little more than a half-circle of earthwork traceable only around its south-eastern arc. Field fences cut through it, scrub has overwhelmed it, and the interior, which holds scattered drystone walling and collapsed stone, remains largely illegible. What draws attention to this overgrown fifteen-metre enclosure is not what remains of the rath itself, but what may once have been found inside it.
The site is possibly, though not certainly, the origin of the Brackloon ogham stone, an inscribed standing stone of early medieval date. Ogham is a script of notched and lined characters cut along the edge of a stone, used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries to record personal and genealogical names. A researcher named Hitchcock discovered the stone repurposed as a chimney-breast in a cottage in Ballintermon, and was told it had been retrieved from the souterrain of a rath, an underground passage or chamber sometimes found within such enclosures, in a field called Páirc an Leasa in Brackloon townland. The field where this rath stands is known locally as Páirc na Claishe, and a separate account recorded by Windele in 1848 placed the stone's origin in Ballintermon townland rather than Brackloon at all. Hitchcock may have confused the two field names, or the accounts may simply be irreconcilable. What is not in doubt is the fate of the inscription itself. All but one letter were chipped away to make the stone fit for use as a chimney-breast. The surviving fragments were presented to the Royal Irish Academy but were subsequently lost or mislaid, and the main stone, retaining just a single ogham character, was later broken up for use in walling. A fragment discovered on a fence in Brackloon in 1891, now in the grounds of Ballinagroun House near Inch, may be part of the same stone; it carries the partial inscription (MA)QI MUCC(OI), a formulaic genealogical phrase meaning something like "son of the tribe of". R. A. S. Macalister, who documented the stone in both 1897 and 1945, tentatively linked it to another ogham stone from Annagap, though that connection has since been largely dismissed.