Ringfort (Rath), Dromadeesirt, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Just off the Killarney to Castleisland road, a circular earthen enclosure sits in pasture on a south-west-facing slope, its presence only slightly announced by a raised rim of ground.
Garden sheds have been built over part of its outer ditch, a house corner nudges into the earthwork at the north-east, and brambles have colonised the north-west quadrant and the southern arc of the bank. This is not unusual for a ringfort, a class of monument so common across Ireland that thousands were quietly absorbed into farmyards, fields, and back gardens over the centuries. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the way the modern landscape has grown around it without quite erasing it, the old form still legible beneath the accumulated domestic clutter.
A ringfort, or rath, is essentially a circular enclosed homestead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and an outer ditch, known as a fosse. This one measures roughly thirty metres in diameter, with a bank about seven metres wide and standing to a height of around two metres on the exterior. A possible entrance gap of just over two metres survives at the south-west. The fosse, which runs clearly to the north-east, becomes infilled and obscured as it curves round to the east and north. Field boundaries radiate outward from the bank at the south-west and north-west, cutting across the fosse, suggesting that the enclosure became a convenient node in the local land division long after it ceased to function as a homestead. The 1894 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a second bank along the western arc, between those two radiating boundaries, a feature that has since been reduced or lost. The site is almost certainly the rath noted in the eastern end of Dromadeesirt in Ordnance Survey name books compiled during the 1840s, making it one of the earlier documented references to this corner of the Kilcummin parish landscape.