What is recorded here

Knocknahoran casts its shadow across the fairytale fort at Baile Na Buaile, where a twenty-four-metre earthen ring still guards the roadside. People may have lived inside that circular bank before stone walling collapsed into loose rubble, yet the fairies supposedly claimed the fort afterwards. The road now passes within metres of the ancient entrance, dragging mortal traffic past a boundary that belongs to imagination rather than history.

Internal diam. 24.5m. This circular univallate rath abuts the E side of the main Dingle to Feohanagh road, at the foot of the SW slopes of Knocknahoran. It is enclosed by a bank of earth and stone and by an external fosse which can be traced around most of the E half of the site. The latter is c. 2.54m wide and up to .67m deep. There is some drystone revetment walling along its inner edge. The road boundary wall is located only 2.4m from the bank at W, and this may account for the disappearance of the fosse in this sector. The bank is a maximum of 2.5m high externally and 1m high internally. It varies in width from c. 2.6 to 5.4m but its inner face has slipped considerably. On the 2nd edition of the OS map, the inner edge of the bank is marked as a continuous solid line, which suggests that it was faced with drystone walling. This latter has completely collapsed and the overgrown interior of the site is spread with a light scatter of loose stones. The entrance at E is 1.45m wide and its S side is lined by a single course of drystone masonry, c. 0.3m high. The above description is derived from J. Cuppage, ‘Corca Dhuibhne. Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey. Ballyferriter. Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne’ (1986), no. 329. In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research. Date of upload: 6 August 2013

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