Ringfort (Rath), Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle in west Kerry, there is a ringfort that has almost entirely dissolved back into the hillside.
What remains is not a dramatic enclosure but something stranger and more fragmentary: two parallel rows of upright stone slabs, extending four metres northward from the site, set roughly seventy centimetres apart and closed off at the far end by a single terminal slab. It is, in other words, the skeleton of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically built during the early medieval period for storage or refuge, now exposed and roofless, its covering long since gone.
The souterrain was recorded by R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who noted that its northern end terminated just outside a circular lios, an enclosed settlement, roughly four and a half metres in diameter. That small enclosure, which would once have been the defining feature of the site, has since vanished entirely. The vague traces of a possible hut foundation survive nearby, but they are faint enough to resist confident interpretation. What Macalister documented as a coherent, if modest, early settlement is now legible only in the stone corridor he described, stripped of its context and sitting quietly on the slope as if waiting for someone to ask the right questions about it.