Ringfort (Rath), Toanreagh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Toanreagh, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with earthworks, stone walls, or at least a hollow in the ground.

This one in Toanreagh, County Kerry, offers none of that. A ringfort, or rath, would originally have been a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and ditch, used in early medieval Ireland most commonly as a defended farmstead. This particular example has vanished so completely that no surface trace remains, leaving behind only its former existence as a piece of cartographic evidence.

The site appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842, dutifully recorded in that great national effort to chart every field and feature of the Irish landscape. By the time a later edition was produced, it had already disappeared from the map, suggesting the physical remains were lost or levelled within a relatively short window. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, placed it southwest of two related sites in the same townland, and that spatial relationship to its neighbours is now, in practical terms, the most concrete thing that can be said about it.

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