Ringfort (Rath), Moohane, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Moohane, Co. Kerry

There is something quietly thought-provoking about a ringfort that has been almost entirely swallowed by the landscape it once dominated.

In a large pastoral field in Moohane, in north County Kerry, what survives of this early medieval enclosure is little more than a low, curving smear of earth, a semi-circular bank rising just 0.7 metres on its external face and a modest 0.4 metres above the interior. A ringfort, or rath, was typically a circular earthen enclosure, sometimes reinforced with a timber palisade, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. Thousands were built across the country, and many still read clearly in the landscape; this one, with an original internal diameter of around 20 metres, has been considerably less fortunate.

The site has been cut from two directions by later fieldbanks, one running roughly northeast to southwest along the western side and another cutting across the north. These boundaries, laid down at some point after the fort fell out of use, have progressively eroded the monument and contributed to the levelling that has left only the southern arc of the original circuit still legible. What remains is essentially a half-circle, and even that is subdued enough that a person crossing the field without prior knowledge might simply register it as a slight unevenness in the ground. That slow erasure, piece by piece, by the ordinary working of agricultural land over centuries, is itself a kind of record of how the Irish countryside has been continuously rewritten across the generations.

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