Ringfort (Rath), Pulleen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Some archaeological sites announce themselves with tumbled stonework or grassy banks you can walk around and touch.
This one offers none of that. The rath that once stood in the townland of Pulleen, in north County Kerry, has left no surface trace whatsoever, surviving only as a name on old maps and a grid reference on a survey page.
A rath, or ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. When a rath has a single enclosing bank it is described as univallate, which is the case here. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is its position: the townland boundary between Glancullare North and Pulleen appears to have run directly through the centre of the site, suggesting the fort was already a landmark of some standing when those administrative lines were drawn. On the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, and again on the 1914 edition, the site is marked as Lisseighter, an anglicisation of the Irish Lios Íochtair, meaning the lower fort. The name implies there was once a corresponding upper fort somewhere nearby, though no such companion site is recorded here. By the time any modern eye looked for it on the ground, the earthworks had vanished entirely, absorbed back into the landscape through centuries of farming and soil movement.
There is nothing to see at Pulleen today in any conventional archaeological sense. The site's interest lies precisely in that absence, and in what the maps preserve: a name, a boundary quirk, and the faint outline of a place that was considered significant enough to name and locate, long after the banks themselves had gone.