Ringfort (Rath), Dirtane, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dirtane, Co. Kerry

By the time the Ordnance Survey returned to this corner of north Kerry in 1916, something had quietly disappeared.

The circular enclosure that cartographers had carefully recorded in 1842, complete with a notation of a cave in its interior, was gone, and it did not make it onto the revised map. The ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland and typically consisting of a raised earthen bank encircling a domestic settlement, had been levelled so completely that nothing of it now remains above ground. What the 1842 surveyors called a cave was almost certainly a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber built beneath or beside such settlements, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. That feature, too, has largely vanished, though not entirely.

Two low mounds in the field are all that survive. The larger is oblong, measuring roughly 10.4 metres by 2.5 metres internally and rising just 0.4 metres above the surrounding ground. About three metres to the south-east sits a second, considerably smaller mound, 2.3 metres by 1 metre internally and only 0.3 metres high. These unassuming rises in the turf are thought to represent what remains of the souterrain recorded in the nineteenth century. The site was documented as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by C. Toal, which systematically catalogued monuments across this part of the county. The gap between the 1842 map and the 1916 edition suggests the ringfort was destroyed sometime in the intervening decades, a period of considerable agricultural change and land clearance across rural Ireland.

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