Ringfort (Rath), Killeagh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Killeagh, Co. Kerry

Sitting quietly in a pasture on a west-facing slope in County Kerry, this small earthwork is easy to miss, and yet it represents a form of settlement that once covered Ireland in its thousands.

It is a rath, a type of ringfort typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when they served as enclosed farmsteads for farming families of varying social rank. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is precisely its modesty: almost perfectly circular, measuring just over nineteen metres across in both directions, its earthen bank worn down and partially smothered by vegetation, it sits in the landscape as a near-invisible remnant of a world that was once ordinary.

The site is defined by an earthen bank, standing to an internal height of around 0.4 metres and an external height of just over a metre, which gives some indication of how much the structure has been reduced over the centuries. Around the eastern and southern arc, and again to the west and north-west, the remains of a fosse are still traceable; a fosse is simply a surrounding ditch, dug to provide both the material for the bank and an additional line of enclosure. The interior is level, as is typical of sites where daily domestic life once took place, stock were kept, and a household organised itself within the protection of the raised perimeter. The denuded state of the bank, and the overgrowth that now covers it, suggest centuries of agricultural pressure and simple neglect, the fate of the majority of the estimated fifty thousand or so ringforts that once existed across the island.

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Pete F
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