Ringfort (Rath), Clievragh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
What looks at first glance like a slightly uneven field corner in Clievragh, County Kerry, is in fact the flattened remains of a bivallate rath, a ringfort defined by two concentric earthen banks rather than one.
That doubling sets it apart from the more common single-banked examples scattered across the Irish countryside, suggesting that whoever settled here wanted a more substantial boundary, whether for defence, status, or simply to keep livestock secure.
The site survives in a levelled but still legible state. The inner bank, roughly 6 metres wide and rising about 0.6 metres above the enclosed ground, surrounds a roughly circular space of approximately 28 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west. Between the inner and outer banks lies a fosse, the term for the shallow ditch dug when earthworks like these were thrown up, running between 2.4 and 3.6 metres across. The outer bank is more modest, reaching about half a metre in height on both sides. The probable entrance faces north-east, where gaps of 3.4 metres and 5 metres break the outer and inner banks respectively, and a separate 3-metre gap in the inner bank to the south may point to a secondary opening or later disturbance. A fieldbank now runs along the eastern sector in a north-south direction, likely a later addition that has partly obscured the original profile. The site was documented as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by C. Toal, which catalogued monuments across this stretch of the county and placed this rath as entry number 390 in that record.