Ringfort (Rath), Shrone More, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Shrone More, Co. Kerry

On the north-west-facing slopes of Knocknabro in County Kerry, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in pasture, neither fully visible nor entirely gone.

What remains of this rath, a type of ringfort formed by one or more earthen banks enclosing a central living area, amounts to little more than a short run of overgrown bank and a scatter of field-clearance rubble piled without obvious order across the ground. The enclosure, around thirty metres in diameter, is detectable mainly because earlier surveyors recorded it before the land swallowed it further.

The site appears on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps from both 1846 and 1894, where it is shown as a roughly circular enclosure. That it was already reduced enough to require cartographic record rather than physical inspection suggests a long process of agricultural attrition. The surviving earthen bank runs north to south, measuring just over four metres wide and rising to about 0.7 metres on its eastern side. Modest dimensions, but enough to confirm that something deliberate was once constructed here. Raths of this kind were typically built during the early medieval period, serving as enclosed farmsteads for families of varying social rank, the bank and any accompanying ditch providing a boundary as much social as defensive. At Shrone More, that boundary is now fragmentary, its stones cleared to field margins and its profile softened by vegetation.

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