Ringfort (Rath), Knockataggle Beg, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Knockataggle Beg, Co. Kerry

What catches the attention at Knockataggle Beg is the sheer scale of what someone went to the trouble of building here, high on a south-south-west-facing hill slope in County Kerry.

This is a bivallate ringfort, meaning it was enclosed not by one but by two concentric earthen banks with a ditch, or fosse, running between them. The inner bank still stands to an external height of two metres along its stronger sections, and the fosse between the two banks widens noticeably along the western arc, reaching around six metres across. The whole enclosure measures roughly 38 metres across. An entrance gap of about two metres cuts through both banks at the south-east, and the outer bank has a separate break at the north-west. Field boundaries have since been built out from the outer bank on the west and north sides, suggesting the monument was absorbed into the working fabric of the landscape over the centuries rather than left apart from it.

Ringforts, known in Irish as ráth when they are earthen and caiseal when built in stone, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a family and their livestock. The double-bank arrangement here placed this site among the more elaborate examples, and it was already attracting notice two centuries ago. A Kilcummin entry in the Ordnance Survey Name Books of the 1840s described the feature as being remarkably large, double ringed, and covered with furze. That description matches what survives on the ground today, with the fosse and outer bank still legible despite the encroachment of vegetation and the gentle southward slope that tilts the northern interior down towards the centre. Stony patches recorded in the north-west and south-west quadrants of the interior hint at subsurface remains, though what they represent has not been formally investigated.

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Pete F
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