Ringfort (Rath), Dromadeesirt, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Dromadeesirt, Co. Kerry

What strikes you first about this ringfort in Dromadeesirt, County Kerry, is that it was already being described as "remarkably large" in the 1840s, when surveyors working on the Ordnance Survey name books noted a rath sitting prominently "on an eminence" in the centre of the townland.

The observation was casual, almost offhand, yet it points to a site substantial enough to catch the eye of people who were cataloguing the entire Irish landscape. The rath, a ringfort defined by a single enclosing bank, was the standard farmstead of early medieval Ireland, typically housing a family of some social standing along with their livestock and outbuildings. What survives here is the earthwork expression of that world, still legible in the Kerry pasture.

The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring approximately 42 metres east to west, and is defined partly by a low earthen bank and partly by a scarp, a natural or cut slope that reinforces the boundary where the bank alone does not run. The bank itself is faced externally with drystone walling of rounded stones, built in a manner closely resembling the field boundaries nearby, which suggests either a shared tradition of construction or that the two were built around the same period by the same hands. Three cattle gaps have been cut through the bank at the south, south-west, and west-north-west, the practical concessions of later farming generations who needed to move animals across a boundary that had long since lost its original defensive or enclosing function. A possible original entrance, about three metres wide, survives at the east-north-east. Trees have colonised sections of the bank over time, softening its profile from a distance.

The site does not sit alone in this landscape. Approximately 100 metres to the east there is a mound of uncertain character, and a second rath lies around 200 metres to the west, making this part of Dromadeesirt a quietly concentrated area of early medieval remains, several features clustered within a short walk of one another across undulating ground.

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