Ringfort (Rath), Tullahennel, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On a pastoral hillside in Tullahennel, County Kerry, a ringfort once stood about two-thirds of the way up a sloping field.
It is no longer there. The site has been levelled, leaving only the documentary record of something that was already quietly fading when surveyors first noted it down.
The fort was classified as a univallate rath, meaning it had a single enclosing earthen bank or rampart rather than the multiple concentric rings that marked higher-status or more defensible sites. Raths of this kind are the most common surviving monument type in Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, and were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval families, dating broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth centuries. This particular example sat in a pastoral field, with a fieldbank running in a northwest to southeast direction immediately to its northeast, suggesting the long continuity of land boundaries in the area, older enclosures folded into later agricultural arrangements. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the rath at that point, but noted that the site had since been levelled, the earthworks graded back into the field around them.