Ringfort (Rath), Faha, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Faha, Co. Kerry

At Faha in north Kerry there is a ringfort that carries its own explanation in its name.

Known in Irish as Lios Ard, meaning the high ringfort, it sits to the south-west of a broader cluster of similar enclosures in the area, a positioning that quietly sets it apart from its neighbours even before you begin to examine its surviving earthworks.

A ringfort, or rath, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland as a defended farmstead. What makes this example particularly interesting is that it appears to be bivallate, meaning it was enclosed not by a single bank and fosse but by two concentric lines of defence. A fosse is simply a ditch, usually dug to provide material for the bank thrown up beside it. Here, the inner bank still stands around 1.6 metres above the fosse, and the subcircular interior measures 33 metres across in both directions. The outer bank survives only along a 27-metre stretch to the north-west, rising roughly 0.9 metres above the fosse at that point, but the fosse itself remains visible at most sections of the site, best preserved to the north-west where it is round-bottomed and approximately 3 metres wide. Two gaps interrupt the circuit: one to the north, some 7 metres across, is a modern insertion; a second, around 6 metres wide to the south-south-west, may be older. This level of measured detail comes from C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued the site as entry number 127 and remains the primary descriptive record for it.

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