Ringfort (Rath), Raheens, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Raheens, Co. Kerry

Much of what once made this ringfort legible as a structure was carted away in the 1950s, broken up and laid down as road surfacing somewhere in south Kerry.

That act of quiet demolition is, in its own way, as revealing as anything the site still has to offer. The rath sits on upland pasture at the southern end of a spur of Caunoge mountain, looking out over the upper reaches of the Inny river valley, and what remains is essentially a low earthwork, a denuded bank of earth, stone and gravel averaging 1.2 metres in external height, with a fosse, the shallow defensive ditch that would once have run around the outside, surviving only in the south-eastern sector. A modern field boundary cuts across the bank at the south, compounding the earlier damage.

A rath is an early medieval enclosed farmstead, typically circular, built of earth and sometimes stone, and this one was originally revetted on its inner face with drystone walling, a technique that would have given the bank structural stability and a dressed appearance. Almost all of that facing was removed in the 1950s for road construction, according to local information, and the outer face has been heavily disturbed too. The enclosure measures around 20 metres in internal diameter north to south, and a gap of roughly 1.5 metres at the east-south-east may mark the original entrance. Within the rath, occupying its north-eastern quadrant, sits a separate circular structure recorded on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map under the name Cloghaun. It measures 7.8 metres in overall diameter, its walls surviving as a low bank of earth and small stones no more than 0.4 metres high. The structure is best preserved on its northern side, with an entrance thought to have been located at the south-west. The Cloghaun name suggests a stone building or cell, and its position inside the rath raises the possibility of a later reuse of the enclosure, though the relationship between the two structures is not firmly established. The survey of the Iveragh Peninsula by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, provides the basis for what is known about the site.

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