Ringfort (Rath), Drommurrin, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Drommurrin, Co. Kerry

Between a thousand and fifteen hundred years of history now grows cabbages.

The ringfort at Drommurrin, tucked directly behind Dromerin House in north County Kerry, survives only in fragments, its once-circular enclosure so thoroughly levelled that much of it has simply been absorbed into the kitchen garden of the neighbouring property. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a defended farmstead during the Early Medieval period, and Ireland once had tens of thousands of them. This particular example measured roughly 32 metres across its interior east to west, which would have made it a reasonably substantial enclosure in its day. Today, the site presents as little more than a sub-circular raised area, and across the northern and western arc, no bank or rise can be distinguished at all above the level of the surrounding land.

The sole surviving earthwork of any consequence runs from west to south-west, where a section of bank approximately 12 metres long, 9 metres wide, and 1.6 metres high still holds its shape. That a stretch of bank nearly a metre and a half tall has endured while the rest was ploughed or graded flat is a small curiosity in itself, suggesting that whatever agricultural activity converted the interior into vegetable plots either stopped short of this corner or found the bank too substantial to bother removing. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site in the condition described here, and the picture it draws is of a monument well on its way to invisibility, preserved more by accident than by any deliberate care.

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