Ringfort (Rath), Srón An Locháin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a low earthen ring sits in the landscape at a place called Srón An Locháin, its Irish name translating roughly as the nose or point of the small lake.
It is the kind of site that rewards a careful eye rather than a signpost, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books simply as an earthen fort, a rath, the term used for a ringfort built from raised banks of earth rather than stone. These structures, circular enclosures typically dating from the early medieval period, served as farmsteads and homesteads across Ireland for several centuries, and thousands of them survive in varying states of preservation across the country.
The description of this particular example as an earthen fort at Drummod comes from the Ordnance Survey Name Books, those nineteenth-century field records compiled as surveyors mapped and named the Irish landscape in systematic detail for the first time. The site also features in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a comprehensive catalogue of the remarkable concentration of monuments found across this stretch of southwest Kerry.