Ringfort (Rath), Gortacurraun, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Gortacurraun, Co. Kerry

In the earthwork, there is a brass shilling that nobody can quite place.

A coin minted during the reign of James II was recovered from a souterrain in a rath in this townland, but Gortacurraun contains two ringforts, both with souterrains, and it has never been established which one yielded the find. That small ambiguity gives this otherwise quietly eroded enclosure an added layer of interest: a seventeenth-century coin, a collapsed underground passage, and an unresolved question sitting between two ancient sites.

The ringfort itself is a univallate rath, meaning it was enclosed by a single earthen bank rather than the multiple concentric rings found at higher-status sites. It sits at the head of the valley running southward from Ballynasare toward Minard beach on the Dingle Peninsula. The interior measures roughly 21.5 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, and where the bank survives it still stands up to 1.75 metres high on the outer face. Parts of it have not fared well: the eastern sector has been levelled, and the southern side has all but vanished. The fosse, the external ditch that would originally have ringed the bank, is now visible only along the southern stretch, where a field fence happens to follow its outer edge and has incidentally protected it. That survival by accident is itself telling. The entrance gap at the south-west is 3.75 metres wide, and a broader break at the west-north-west may be a later, secondary opening rather than an original feature. Inside, a series of depressions and holes point to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, though this one has collapsed and cannot be entered. O'Sullivan, writing in 1931, recorded the discovery of the James II shilling somewhere in this townland, but the two-ringfort problem means the coin's exact origin remains genuinely open.

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