Ringfort (Rath), Curraduff, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Curraduff, Co. Kerry

Between the first and second editions of the Ordnance Survey maps, half of a ringfort quietly disappeared.

The site known in Irish as Lios Páircín Raighlí, set on a west-facing slope above the valley running south from Camp in County Kerry, was recorded in the early nineteenth century as a complete circular enclosure, the kind of earthen fort, typically dating from the early medieval period, that once served as a farmstead or small defended settlement. By the time surveyors returned for the second edition, only the western half was still traceable on paper. What survives today is a level, semi-circular platform measuring roughly 22 metres north to south and just over 11 metres east to west, its downslope edge defined by a drop of 1.8 metres to the field below. The eastern portion has been lost entirely, absorbed into the working landscape over the intervening years.

The site's Irish name, Lios Páircín Raighlí, is a lios, the term for a ringfort defined by an earthen bank rather than stone, and it sits at a position that would have made considerable practical sense to whoever built it. The slope commands a wide view westward across Tralee Bay toward the Magharees peninsula, that narrow finger of land stretching into the Atlantic north of Castlegregory. Whether that prospect mattered for defence, for farming, or simply because it was the available ground, the location places the fort in a long tradition of early Irish settlement that favoured elevated, outward-facing sites. J. Cuppage documented the remains as part of the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, which catalogued this site among hundreds of others across one of the most archaeologically dense landscapes in Ireland. The early Ordnance Survey notebooks, which described it simply as a circular earthen fort in the townland records for Kilgobban, preserve the memory of what the complete enclosure once looked like before agricultural pressure reduced it to a half-circle on a hillside.

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