Ringfort (Rath), Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope above the valley of the Drombohilly River, a slightly raised oval in the pasture grass is about all that remains of what was once an enclosed farmstead, probably dating to the early medieval period.

The enclosure measures roughly 36.5 metres east to west and 27.5 metres north to south, and what you are really reading in the landscape is the ghost of a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a circular or oval earthwork that typically surrounded a farming household between around 500 and 1000 AD. Thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, but this one is notably worn. The defining bank is eroded and grass-covered, rising only about 25 centimetres on its inner face and 90 centimetres on the outer, and the fosse, the external ditch that would have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, survives in intermittent sections rather than as a continuous ring. A low ridge runs across much of the interior, east to west, its origin unrecorded.

What gives the site a particular thread of interest is its connection to a wider survey carried out in the area during the 1930s. Captain D. B. O'Connell, working under the auspices of the Kerry Archaeological Society, recorded three raths in the townlands of Drombohilly Lower and Upper during that decade, and this enclosure is considered one of them. The fact that three such monuments were noted within a single small area suggests the valley was reasonably well settled during the early medieval centuries, each rath representing a separate household or family unit making use of the river valley's resources. O'Connell's fieldwork belongs to a generation of local antiquarian recording that has since proved invaluable, precisely because many of the features he noted have continued to deteriorate in the intervening decades.

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Pete F
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