Ringfort (Rath), Toon, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Toon, Co. Kerry

A modern road has sliced clean through this early medieval ringfort on the slopes west of Teermoyle mountain in south Kerry, and the eastern half of the enclosure has vanished so completely that no trace of it survives above ground.

What remains on the western side is enough to read the outline of a rath, the Irish term for an earthen ringfort, typically built as a defended farmstead between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The surviving bank, composed of earth around a stone core, stands 1.6 metres high on its outer face and drops about a metre to the interior, still broad enough at 1.5 metres wide to have formed a meaningful barrier. At the south-west, an eroded gap of 2.7 metres marks what was likely the original entrance.

Beside that entrance stands something easy to overlook: a single upright stone, less than a metre tall, recorded on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map under the name the Gallaun. A gallaun is a standing stone, generally a solitary, undressed slab set vertically in the ground, and here it appears to have served a specific architectural purpose, acting as a portal stone to one side of the entranceway. It measures just 0.86 metres high, 0.33 metres wide, and 0.12 metres thick, modest by any standard, but its placement beside the threshold suggests it was deliberate rather than incidental. Inside the western arc of the enclosure, a low stony mound sits in the northern quadrant; its origins are less certain, and it may simply be spoil or debris thrown up during the road's construction rather than anything connected with the rath's original use.

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Pete F
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