Ringfort (Rath), An Ghairfeanaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the eastern slopes of Sugarloaf hill on the Dingle Peninsula, a roughly circular earthwork sits on a level shoulder of ground above a steep drop to the Garfinny river.
The shoulder itself may be partly artificial, shaped to give the enclosure a stable platform where the natural terrain would otherwise have been unworkable. This is a univallate rath, meaning a ringfort enclosed by a single bank and ditch, a form of defended farmstead common across early medieval Ireland. What makes this particular example quietly compelling is not its scale but the detail still visible within and around it: the ditch, the revetted inner face of the bank, and the remains of small stone buildings that once pressed against the interior walls.
The enclosing bank reaches a maximum external height of 1.75 metres, with the inner face along the southern and south-eastern sectors reinforced with drystone masonry. The fosse, the external ditch that would have added both a physical and symbolic barrier to the enclosure, survives best along the south-western arc, where it is roughly 0.9 metres deep and 3.3 metres wide at its base. Inside the rath, early Ordnance Survey maps recorded two clochauns, the Irish term for small corbelled stone huts built without mortar, their courses of stone overlapping inward to form a beehive-shaped roof. One of these abutted the inner face of the bank at the north-east and was approximately 3.5 metres in diameter internally, though only its north-western half can now be traced; its drystone walls survive to just 0.75 metres in height. A second is indicated only by a kink in the revetment walling to the south, and an irregular stony mound a little south-west of centre likely marks a third structure. The south-eastern entrance gap, once the threshold through which people and animals passed, is now blocked and heavily disturbed. The site was documented in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey.