Ringfort (Rath), Sheepwalk, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Sheepwalk, Co. Kerry

In a townland called Sheepwalk in north Kerry, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its outer bank still rising to nearly two metres in places.

That disproportion is one of the more telling details about it: the bank looks far more imposing from outside than from within, where the interior sits at a slightly higher level than the surrounding ground and the inner face of the bank stands only about half a metre to just under a metre tall. The effect is less of a wall and more of a raised platform defined by an encircling ridge.

This is a univallate ringfort, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than the two or three concentric rings found at more elaborate examples. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths when earthen and cashels when built of dry stone, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a family and their livestock. This particular example is of mixed earth and stone construction, a combination not unusual in Kerry where both materials were readily available. Its internal diameter runs to 39.4 metres north to south, placing it comfortably within the normal range for the type. To the south-southeast and southeast, a faint fosse, the external ditch that would once have reinforced the bank, can still be traced; it measures roughly 3.4 metres wide and a metre deep, suggesting it was never especially pronounced or has silted and settled considerably over the centuries. A later fieldbank cuts across the northeastern to eastern side, a reminder that agricultural reorganisation in more recent centuries paid little attention to what lay underneath. The site was documented in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by C. Toal.

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