Ringfort (Rath), Coolies, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Most ancient enclosures announce themselves with a bank, a ditch, a rise in the ground that interrupts the surrounding field.
The rath at Coolies in County Kerry does the opposite: it has been levelled almost entirely back into the pasture, leaving only the faintest topographical memory of what was once there. A shallow circular depression, barely fifteen centimetres deep and measuring roughly three by four metres, sits in the southern part of the area. That, and a general unevenness in the grass, is all that remains above ground.
A rath, to use the Irish term, is a type of ringfort, typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or settlement for a single family and their animals. Thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation, though many have been lost to agriculture over the centuries. The Coolies example falls into that latter category. It was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1846 and 1894 to 1895 as a circular enclosure of roughly thirty metres in diameter, sitting in level pasture approximately twenty metres south of the Finoulagh River. By the time it was surveyed on the ground, the enclosing earthwork had been ploughed or worn flat, leaving a ghost of itself in an area of around thirty-two metres across. Whether the original bank was substantial or modest is impossible now to say, though the river's proximity and the level terrain suggest a reasonably sheltered, agriculturally workable position for whoever once lived here.