Ringfort (Rath), Tulla More, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tulla More, Co. Kerry

A later farmer's field boundary has done more damage to this early medieval enclosure than centuries of weather and neglect combined.

Sometime after the rath at Tulla More was abandoned, a fieldbank was driven straight through its middle along a north-south line, splitting what had been a roughly circular domestic enclosure into two unequal halves and leaving the site in the condition it remains in today.

A univallate rath, meaning one enclosed by a single earthen bank and ditch rather than the multiple concentric rings that marked higher-status settlements, would originally have served as a farmstead, protecting a household and its livestock in early medieval Ireland. The example at Tulla More had an internal diameter of around 25 metres north to south. The western half survives better, where the surviving arc of earthen bank still rises to about 0.6 metres and measures roughly 3.7 metres across at its base. The eastern half has been so thoroughly levelled that the remains are barely distinguishable from the surrounding ground. Within the south-western sector of the interior sits a small mound measuring approximately 2 metres by 2.4 metres internally, the purpose of which is not specified in the available record but which may represent a structural remnant of the original occupation. These details were recorded in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995.

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