Ringfort (Rath), Stagmount, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Stagmount, Co. Kerry

A ringfort that has effectively been cut in half by the passage of time and land use is already an unusual thing, but what makes this particular rath in Stagmount, County Kerry, quietly arresting is precisely what is missing.

The eastern half has vanished entirely, leaving only a curved arc of earthen bank tracing a D-shape in the pasture, its outline broken at the south and north-north-west, its interior sloping away downhill. Field-clearance rubble sits piled against the bank in no particular order, a sign of generations of farmers finding the structure more useful as a convenient dump than as an archaeological monument.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically circular, formed from one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or defended homestead. This one sits on a steep south-facing slope with views across to The Paps of Dana, the twin-peaked hills in the Derrynasaggart Mountains that take their name from the ancient goddess. The rath was recorded in the 1940s through the Schools Manuscript scheme, a nationwide project in which Irish schoolchildren collected local historical and geographical information, and at that time the monument straddled the boundary between two separate landholdings, one belonging to a Denis D. Houlihan and the other to a Denis J. Houlihan. The western portion, now the only part with any visible presence above ground, consists of an earthen bank roughly 2.3 metres wide, standing about 1.4 metres on the interior face and 1.5 metres on the exterior, running for around 24 metres before it meets a more recent field boundary on the east. That boundary may itself account for the disappearance of the eastern half, or the land may simply have been worked and levelled over the intervening centuries. A separate enclosure lies approximately 50 metres to the north-east, suggesting this part of the hillside was once considerably more occupied than it appears today.

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