Ringfort (Rath), Coolgarriv, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Coolgarriv, Co. Kerry

Between the Tralee-Killarney railway line and a quiet Kerry pasture, a ringfort has been quietly losing the argument with the nineteenth century.

What was once a substantial circular enclosure, roughly 55 metres across, now survives only as a D-shaped remnant, its eastern half sliced away when the railway was laid. The straight edge of the surviving arc runs for about 30 metres along the track, and the interior, where it remains, is lumpy with hummocks, the uneven ground that often signals collapsed or disturbed subsurface features.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the typical farmstead enclosure of early medieval Ireland, defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and enclosing a household and its outbuildings. This one was already visible on the 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a complete circle, but by the time the updated map was produced in 1939, the eastern half had gone. A local correspondent writing that same year noted an old ringed fort with the centre dug away, suggesting the interior had also been disturbed before any formal record was made. An account from the 1940s, almost certainly describing the same site near Coolgarriv House, recorded earthen banks still standing between six and ten feet high and a circuit of about 200 yards. Beneath the surface, or what remains of it, there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with storage or refuge in early medieval settlements.

The site sits in pasture on a gentle north-facing slope, and the railway forms its most conspicuous boundary today. The differential growth visible along the surviving arc, where vegetation follows the line of buried or disturbed earthworks, offers a faint outline of what the full enclosure once looked like before the Tralee-Killarney line claimed its eastern half.

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Pete F
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