Ringfort (Rath), Doire Mhór Thoir, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Doire Mhór Thoir, Co. Kerry

Half of this early medieval enclosure no longer exists.

A field wall cuts straight through it from north-northeast to south-southwest, the entire eastern half of the site has been removed, and what remains to the west has been used over the years as a convenient place to dump stones cleared from surrounding fields. It is, by any measure, a heavily compromised site, yet the surviving southwestern arc of the bank still rises to 1.5 metres on its interior face, enough to give a physical sense of what a univallate rath once looked like in this landscape. A univallate rath is simply a ringfort defined by a single encircling bank and ditch, the most common form of early medieval farmstead in Ireland, typically built and occupied between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries.

What makes the setting worth pausing over is the location itself. The rath sits on a level coastal strip caught between Tralee Bay to the north and the Slieve Mish mountains rising to the south, a corridor of lowland that has channelled movement and settlement on the Dingle Peninsula for millennia. Someone chose this particular piece of flat ground, perhaps for its proximity to the shore, perhaps for the shelter afforded by the mountains behind. The enclosure had an internal diameter of around 20 metres, a modest but functional space. Its condition as documented by archaeologist J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey was already one of progressive loss, the southwestern sector preserving a bank between 2.75 and 4.2 metres wide, while the northeastern sector was largely gone. The surviving fragment is less a monument now than a set of earthen outlines, a partial signature of a farmstead whose inhabitants farmed this same coastal ground more than a thousand years ago.

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