Ringfort (Rath), Lissaniska, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
The place-name gave it away long before the earthworks came into view.
Bán na Ráth, meaning roughly "lea-ground of the ringfort", is the Irish name attached to this field in north Kerry, and the land itself seems to have remembered what stood here even when later generations might not have. What survives is a bivallate rath, a ringfort defined by not one but two concentric earthen banks, and it is considerably more substantial than the kind of low, half-eroded ring that often gets lumped in with field boundaries and forgotten.
The inner bank of this rath rises to 1.4 metres above the enclosed interior, which is itself elevated above the surrounding pasture. On the southern side, the outer face of that bank climbs to 2.9 metres above the fosse, the defensive ditch that separates the two banks. That fosse varies between 2 and 4.4 metres in width, and the whole structure, measured from outer edge to outer edge, spans roughly 46 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west. A ringfort typically served as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and the double-bank arrangement here would have marked out a household of some local standing; the extra circuit of bank and ditch was not built casually. A 4.3-metre gap in the inner bank to the south-east is thought to mark the original entrance, which would have faced toward more open ground. The outer bank, narrower than the inner one and averaging around 3 metres at the base, has been partly absorbed into a field fence along its western and northern arc, a fate that has befallen countless such monuments across Ireland, though here the essential form remains legible.