Ringfort (Rath), Tubrid Beg, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tubrid Beg, Co. Kerry

At the centre of this ringfort in Tubrid Beg, north Kerry, there is a mound that sits over what was once a shaft roughly thirty feet deep.

The shaft has been closed up, and a second one in the northern part of the enclosure has been filled in too. Nobody now seems certain what they were. That quiet uncertainty is part of what makes this site worth considering carefully.

A rath is an early medieval enclosure, typically earthen, that once served as a farmstead or a place of high-status settlement. The Tubrid Beg example was originally bivallate, meaning it had two concentric enclosing banks and ditches rather than one. The outer ring has been entirely removed, leaving no visible trace above ground, and a bohareen, a narrow country lane, cuts straight through the surviving earthwork in a roughly west-southwest to east-northeast direction. What remains is still substantial: the single enclosing bank rises to 2.5 metres on its interior face and to 4.3 metres on the exterior, where the ground drops sharply away. The external fosse, a defensive ditch, survives only on the western to north-eastern arc, where it measures between 1.2 and 3.4 metres wide and about 1.2 metres deep. The interior sits at a noticeably higher level than the surrounding land, and two gaps of roughly 2 metres each break the bank to the northwest and southeast, likely the positions of former entrances.

The circular mound at the centre measures approximately 7.8 metres east-west and stands 1.2 metres high. Just under seven metres to its south lies a shallow depression, the filled remnant of the thirty-foot shaft the landowner described. A second closed shaft once occupied the northern sector. Their original purpose is unrecorded. These details come from C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which documented the site at a time when the landowner's memory of earlier interventions was still available to be captured.

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Pete F
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