Ringfort (Rath), Kilmeany, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilmeany, Co. Kerry

In the Black Wood near Kilmeany in County Kerry, there is, or once was, a ringfort.

The problem is that nobody can find it. An oval-shaped enclosure, the kind of earthwork the Irish call a rath, a circular or near-circular bank-and-ditch enclosure that would once have formed the defended boundary of an early medieval farmstead, was recorded clearly enough on Ordnance Survey maps drawn in 1841 and 1842. By the time the next edition was produced, it had vanished from the cartographers' records entirely. When surveyors went looking on the ground, no surface trace could be found at all.

This is, in its quiet way, a peculiar situation. The 1841 to 1842 OS mapping of Ireland was a remarkably thorough project, and the inclusion of an enclosure on those sheets suggests it was visible, or at least reliably reported, at that time. What happened between that survey and the later edition is unclear. Woodland can obscure earthworks, collapse them through root action, or simply make them difficult to verify, and the Black Wood would have had ample time to do its work. The ringfort here lies to the northeast of another recorded site in the same wood, suggesting this was once a landscape with more going on beneath the canopy than is currently legible. Whether the enclosure survives in some degraded form under the leaf litter, or whether it has been lost entirely, remains an open question.

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Pete F
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