Ringfort (Rath), Killiney, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Killiney, Co. Kerry

At the foot of Stradbally mountain in Co. Kerry, a ringfort sits on a gently sloping hillside facing north, its earthen bank partly collapsed, partly buried, and much of it swallowed by dense vegetation.

What survives is fragmentary but specific: a univallate rath, meaning a single-banked enclosure of the kind that once served as a defended farmstead across early medieval Ireland, with an estimated internal diameter of around 23 metres. That is roughly the footprint of a modest country house, enclosed within a bank that still rises to 1.3 metres on the outer face in places, and about 4 metres wide at its base. The outlook it commands, across both Tralee and Brandon Bays towards Brandon Head and Kerry Head, suggests that whoever built it was not indifferent to the landscape.

The most telling detail is a stretch of rough drystone masonry on the outer flank of the bank in the north-northwest sector. Loose stones scattered along both the interior and exterior of the bank suggest this facing was once considerably more extensive, the structure having been robbed of its material over time. A substantial portion of the bank has been removed entirely on the southeast through to the north arc, and earth and stones dumped against the surviving northern section have compounded the damage, further blurring what remains. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a systematic survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, and the condition recorded then has not markedly improved since.

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Pete F
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