Ringfort (Rath), Faha, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In a field near Faha in north Kerry, a ringfort sits so quietly in the landscape that along its northern and south-eastern edges it barely registers as anything more than a gentle swelling of the ground.
Only when you know what you are looking at does the full circuit begin to resolve itself: a roughly circular enclosure, about twenty metres across, defined by an earthen bank that has been flattened by centuries of farming and weather until it is little more than a low, wide ridge.
The site carries the Irish name Lios a Cóig, meaning fort of the host, sometimes rendered in English as Lissahope. A rath, as this type of monument is known, is an enclosure formed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built during the early medieval period in Ireland, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, and used primarily as a farmstead or domestic enclosure rather than a military fortification. This particular example is univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than multiple concentric ones. That bank measures around five metres in width, standing 1.3 metres above the ground outside and only 0.6 metres above the interior, suggesting considerable slumping over time. The site sits in close proximity to at least two other recorded monuments in the immediate area, hinting that this part of north Kerry was once a reasonably well-settled stretch of early medieval countryside, even if the land now gives little away.