Ringfort (Rath), Cool, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the eastern slope of Corrin Hill in County Kerry, four ringforts sit in close formation, spaced near enough to one another that whoever built and used them were almost certainly neighbours, perhaps kin.
This one is the northernmost of the group, and something about that clustering invites curiosity. Ringforts, or raths, are enclosed farmsteads typical of early medieval Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, their circular banks and ditches marking out domestic space rather than military fortification. Finding four together on a single hillside suggests a small community rather than an isolated household, a pattern of settlement that rarely survives so legibly in the landscape.
The rath itself is roughly circular, measuring about 20.6 metres north to south and 19 metres east to west. Because it sits on a south-east facing slope, the earthen bank that encloses it behaves asymmetrically: on the upslope side it rises to about two metres internally, while on the downslope side it barely reaches fifteen centimetres. The effect is practical, compensating for the gradient to create a more level interior. An external fosse, a defensive ditch, runs around most of the perimeter, between 2.7 and 3.5 metres wide and up to around 0.8 metres deep, though it disappears along the south-east sector where the natural slope may have made it redundant. The entrance gap, 2.6 metres wide and facing broadly north-east, is marked on its southern side by a large stone set upright on edge. Inside, against the bank at the east-south-east, the remains of a small D-shaped hut survive: four metres by 4.6 metres internally, its entrance defined by two stones placed on edge just over half a metre apart. The walls have largely collapsed into rubble, though a short section of the inner face on the west-south-west side still stands to about half a metre. A slight depression just east of the centre has long been associated in local tradition with a souterrain, an underground passage or storage chamber of the kind commonly found within raths, though this one has not been confirmed. The survey description published by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey first documented these features in detail.