Ringfort (Rath), Curragh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Curragh, Co. Kerry

What survives of this early medieval enclosure is less than half of what once existed, and the reason why is written plainly in the landscape.

A curving arc of earthen bank, running roughly south-east to north-west and measuring around 38 metres in circumference, is all that remains of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built in their thousands across Ireland between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries. The bank itself is still substantial in places, nearly two and a half metres high on the exterior face and over seven metres wide, which gives some sense of how commanding the original circuit would have appeared on this north-west-facing slope above Curragh Lodge.

The northern arc of the bank no longer exists in its original form. Local information indicates it was pushed inward during the construction of a farm shed immediately to the north, leaving a large mound of displaced earth occupying the northern sector of what would once have been the interior. This was not the first time agricultural activity reshaped the site. Ordnance Survey maps from both 1846 and 1894 show farm buildings already overlying the bank and interior at the north-east and east, meaning the encroachment was well underway by the mid-nineteenth century at least. Elsewhere, the top of the surviving bank has been partially levelled along the south-south-east and west-north-west arcs, and loose material has been pushed into mounds both inside and outside the remaining circuit. Beneath all of this activity, the northern sector still contains a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber, the kind typically associated with raths and thought to have served for storage or refuge. That it survives at all, given what has happened above ground, is quietly remarkable.

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