Ringfort (Rath), Mweevuck, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In the fields of Mweevuck in north Kerry, a ringfort sits that no edition of the Ordnance Survey has ever thought to mark.
That omission is itself worth noting. Ireland has thousands of ringforts, and the OS maps recorded a great many of them, so to find one that slipped through entirely is a small puzzle, a quiet reminder that the archaeological record of even a well-studied landscape is never quite complete.
A ringfort, or rath, is one of the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, typically a circular enclosure defined by a bank and ditch, used as a farmstead or defended homestead, most often dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. The Mweevuck example is modest by any measure. Its earthen bank is about ten metres wide but only around 0.6 metres high, barely more than a low swell in the ground, and its external fosse, a shallow ditch running from the north around through the east to the south, is no more than half a metre deep and two metres across. The interior, some thirty metres in diameter, sits at roughly the same level as the land around it, which gives the whole thing an unusually flat, unassertive quality. Two original entrances survive: one to the west at 1.8 metres wide, one to the east at 2.6 metres. The double entrance is a detail worth pausing on, since most raths have a single opening, and the presence of two here, facing roughly opposite directions, hints at a pattern of movement across the site that is now impossible to reconstruct. The site lies two fields south-east of another recorded monument in the area, and that proximity suggests a landscape that was once considerably more structured than it appears today.