Ringfort (Rath), Doon, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Doon, Co. Kerry

Tucked into the corner of a field near Doon in County Kerry, this earthwork has been quietly subsiding into the landscape for well over a thousand years, its banks gradually softening under a cover of briars and rushes.

It is the kind of place that registers, if at all, as a slightly uneven rise at the edge of farmland, something a tractor routes around without much thought. Yet the underlying structure is remarkably intact.

The site is a univallate rath, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the two or three concentric rings found at more elaborate examples. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosure, typically dating to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries, built to define and protect a family's living space and livestock rather than to serve any military function. Here, the enclosure is oval in plan, measuring 41 metres north to south and 33 metres east to west internally, which places it at a reasonable size for a site of this type. The earthen bank that surrounds it is well-defined, rising to a maximum external height of 2.6 metres and an interior height of 1.6 metres, with a width of around 4 metres. Immediately outside the bank runs a fosse, a U-shaped ditch approximately 3 metres wide and 1 metre deep, which would originally have provided both drainage and an additional obstacle. A gap of around 4 metres in the northeast sector of the bank is likely the original entrance. Two fieldbanks, one running north to south along the eastern side and another running east to west along the south, have been built up against the rath at some point, effectively pressing it into the corner of the current field system and suggesting the site has been absorbed into later agricultural arrangements without being destroyed entirely.

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Pete F
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