Ringfort (Rath), Tullaghna, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Tullaghna, Co. Kerry

Some sites reward a visitor with earthworks, grassy banks, or at least a suggestive hollow in the ground.

This one in Tullaghna, County Kerry, offers none of that. The ringfort recorded here, a rath being a roughly circular enclosed farmstead of early medieval date typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, has left no visible trace whatsoever. It exists now only as a cartographic ghost, a site whose entire material presence has been erased between one survey and the next.

The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, placing it among the thousands of similar features that surveyors were documenting across Ireland at that period. By the time the 1916 edition of the same mapping was produced, it had vanished from the record entirely. Whether it was levelled for agricultural improvement, absorbed into field boundaries, or simply missed during revision is not known. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, placed it one field to the south-west of a neighbouring site, which is itself the closest thing to a locational anchor that survives. That proximity suggests the landscape here once held a cluster of such features, the kind of early settlement pattern common across Munster, though only the neighbouring site retains any presence on the ground.

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Pete F
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