Fairy fort / earthen ringfort in Knockanush East

'Located on the south-facing slope of Knockanush hill, this site affords commanding views of Tralee Bay, the Slieve Mish and the Lee Valley. This site is listed in the Record of Monuments & Places for County Kerry as an enclosure but it would appear more likely to be the disturbed remains of a barrow. There are clear traces of a ditch on the eastern and southern sides of the site. This ditch remains only as a shallow depression measuring 1.8 wide and 0.40m in maximum depth. The surrounding bank is intact but is not quite circular. It is highest on the west where it remains to 0.8m in height externally and 0.5m high internally. However, the bank is very varied in width, being much broader at east and west than at the north and south. At the west it is 4.9m in width while at the north it is half this width. This discrepancy in the bank width is mainly due to the presence of material internally on the east and west, which may well be derived from the dumbbell shaped interior, which looks to be the result of digging into a mound that originally occupied the interior. This mound remains to a height of 0.6m. Internally the site measures 18.1m N-S and 19.5m E-W. Overall diameter of the site is 40.4m. Aerial photography indicates the possible presence of an outer bank on the south-east side of the monument but this is not visible at ground level. It also clearly shows two parallel banks......running from the enclosing bank of the site in an easterly direction toward a field boundary, where they terminate. The banks are 42m apart and are visible at ground level where they are 0.30m in maximum height and 3.5m in average width. The more northerly bank is 106m in length the more southerly is 98m long. The minutes of a meeting of the County Kerry Field Club for February 1940 record a description of a site, which appears to be this particular monument. The description is as follows:…..on the southern brow of the hill the party were shown a site where during quarrying operations an underground hutsite was exposed. There was much soot on the stones and passage but the site was not investigated. It was closed up again and the quarry opened at a different place. While vague, the description suggests that this is the site in question and that there was a stone structure with a passage within the site. The structure was clearly not a souterrain as the club members were very familiar with this monument type and did not offer this as a suggestion, while the presence of soot clearly suggests evidence of burning.. As such, the possibility exists that a burial chamber of some sort was located at this site, which clearly displays evidence of digging.' Description from ‘The Prehistoric Settlement of the Lee Valley, Tralee, Co. Kerry; A Landscape Perspective’ by Michael Connolly. PhD Thesis UCC 2008 Date of upload: 06 July 2012