Ringfort (Rath), Márthain, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Márthain, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Croaghmarhin on the Dingle Peninsula, a large ringfort sits quietly against a modern roadway, its great earthen bank still standing up to 3.8 metres high in places despite centuries of disturbance.

A rath is a circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period, built to define a farmstead and provide a degree of protection for those living within. This one is univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the two or three concentric rings found at more elaborate examples, but its scale is considerable: the interior spans roughly 36.5 metres north to south and nearly 39.5 metres east to west, making it a notably substantial example of its type.

The bank retains intermittent stretches of drystone revetment walling along its inner face, suggesting it was once faced in stone to stabilise the earthwork. An external fosse, the defensive ditch dug to create the material for the bank, survives to a depth of around 2.3 metres, though the road to the south has obliterated it in that sector and levelled a short stretch of the bank itself. That damaged south-eastern section is almost certainly where the original entrance once stood, since the bank is otherwise unbroken. Inside, the northern portion of the enclosure is a puzzle of irregular ridges, hollows, and stone mounds that do not resolve into any clear pattern, though some linear hollows suggest the presence of a souterrain, an underground passage or storage chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlements in Ireland. Some large flat slabs lying on the ground nearby may once have formed part of its roof. Writing in 1931, an observer named O'Sullivan described what was then still visible as a rectangular stone structure about four feet high, roofed with flagstones, one of which had already fallen in. That structure is now represented only by the largest of the surviving mounds, which measures just over five metres east to west. Two further features within the enclosure are tentatively identified as hut-sites, though the disturbance of the bank in the southern sector makes one of them difficult to interpret with confidence. J. Cuppage documented the site in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, and the description published then remains the primary account of what survives.

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