Ringfort (Rath), Aulanebane, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Aulanebane, Co. Kerry

In a field in Aulanebane, a piece of early medieval Ireland has been erased so completely that only old maps now confirm it ever existed.

The site is a rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure typically thrown up between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries as a farmstead boundary, and once common enough across Ireland that tens of thousands are thought to have existed. This one is gone. Levelled during field clearance work, it leaves no ridge, no bank, no hollow in the ground to suggest what once stood here.

The Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 recorded the enclosure clearly, and it was still present, at least in outline, when the 1898 edition was drawn. By that later survey, however, a fieldbank running in a roughly north-west to south-east direction already cut across it, suggesting the enclosure was losing its integrity even before it disappeared entirely. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, placed the site south-west of a neighbouring monument in the same field, and that catalogue entry is now among the few records attesting to its former existence. The gap between the two map editions, and the encroachment of the fieldbank, trace the slow logic of agricultural improvement overwriting an older landscape.

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Pete F
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