Ringfort (Rath), Faghbane, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Faghbane, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with tumbled walls or grassy banks you can walk around and touch.

This one, near Faghbane east of Killarney, exists almost entirely as a photograph. A circular enclosure roughly twenty metres across shows up as a cropmark on an aerial image taken in 1989, the kind of ghostly outline that only becomes legible when drought or differential soil conditions cause the grass above buried features to grow or fade at a different rate from the surrounding ground. Stand in the level pasture on the low hillock where it sits, about 450 metres south of the Flesk River, and there is nothing to see.

The site is classified as a possible rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead that was built and occupied across Ireland roughly between the early centuries AD and the early medieval period. Tens of thousands survive in some form around the country, but survival is uneven. Many were levelled by agriculture over centuries, and what the plough or the drainage ditch does not erase can still vanish from the visible landscape entirely, leaving only the faint chemical memory of a ditch or bank pressed into the soil. Here, the hillock setting is consistent with how raths were often sited, slightly elevated within otherwise flat agricultural ground, but without excavation the classification remains tentative. The cropmark record is the only evidence that something was ever here at all.

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Pete F
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