Ringfort (Rath), Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Kerry

At the foot of the eastern slopes of Croaghmarhin, on the low-lying crescent of land curving around Smerwick Harbour in County Kerry, a ringfort has effectively ceased to exist, absorbed quietly into the domestic boundary of a garden.

What was once a roughly circular earthen enclosure, a rath of the kind that served early medieval Ireland as a farmstead defended by banks and ditches, has been levelled so completely that only the earthen bank around the adjacent garden may preserve any trace of its original material.

Early Ordnance Survey records described it as circular, with a ruined fence of stones and earth around it, measuring approximately 1.5 chains in diameter, or just over thirty metres across. By the time the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map was produced, the southern half had already been cleared away and replaced with a field wall, though that wall still followed the gentle curve of the original enclosure, a ghost of the old form preserved almost by accident. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, recorded the site's condition at that point and noted its position on the broad, sheltered ground that wraps around Smerwick Harbour.

What makes this site quietly interesting is less what survives than what the sequence of its disappearance reveals. First the structure fell into ruin, then half of it was cannibalised for a field boundary, then the rest was levelled, and finally its material was most likely folded into a garden bank next door. The ringfort did not vanish in one event but was dismantled gradually, each generation finding a practical use for what the previous one had left behind.

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Pete F
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