Ringfort (Rath), Toormore, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Toormore, Co. Kerry

A ring of rushes growing in pasture near the crest of a low hill in Toormore is not the most dramatic of markers, but it is, apparently, all that visibly remains of what was once a rath, the term for an earthen-banked ringfort of early medieval Ireland.

These enclosures, typically circular and defined by one or more earthen banks, were once among the most common field monuments across the Irish landscape, serving as defended farmsteads for families of middling status. Here, the bank has largely disappeared into the ground, its outline surviving only as a slight concavity in the earth and the damp-loving rushes that follow the old circuit.

The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the enclosure as a roughly circular feature of approximately forty metres in diameter, a measurement that has since contracted in visible terms to around twenty metres. Within the hollow interior lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlements in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. What makes this particular site a little stranger than most is what lies immediately to its north-west: a possible cursing stone. Cursing stones, sometimes called leac na mallacht, are objects, often rounded or holed stones, historically associated with rituals of invoking harm or binding oaths, and they appear occasionally in proximity to ancient enclosures and holy sites across Ireland. Whether the one at Toormore retains any local memory or tradition attached to it is not recorded, but its presence beside an already-eroded rath gives the quiet hilltop a slightly unsettled atmosphere.

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