Ringfort (Rath), Ballymacquin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In the farmland of Ballymacquin in County Kerry, a field boundary makes an inexplicable curve.
To a passing eye it looks like nothing more than a slight irregularity in the hedgerow, the kind of thing a farmer might have left to accommodate a boggy patch or an awkward slope. In fact, that curve is the ghost of an early medieval ringfort, a circular earthen enclosure of the type once used across Ireland as a defended farmstead, its northern bank quietly absorbed into a later field system and preserved, almost accidentally, as a kink in an otherwise straight line.
The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842, its roughly circular form measuring just over twenty-five metres across internally in both directions. By the time the later OS edition was produced, it had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely, the bank having been levelled to the point where it no longer registered as a distinct feature worth marking. What survives is modest but legible on the ground: a bank some four metres wide, rising to about eighty centimetres at its highest, and that telltale northward curve where the ringfort's perimeter was pressed into service as a field boundary. C. Toal documented the site in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which remains the principal record of what is here.
The site is typical of the hundreds of raths, as these earthen ringforts are also known, that once punctuated the Kerry landscape, most of them dating to the early medieval period between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. What makes this particular example worth noticing is precisely how thoroughly it has been erased and yet how completely it persists, written into the modern field pattern in a single curved hedge that marks the arc of a bank no one thought worth keeping.