Ringfort (Rath), Baile Ristín, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Baile Ristín, Co. Kerry

Some places earn their place in the archaeological record precisely because they no longer exist.

The ringfort once known as Lisgallagh, or Lios Coille, in Baile Ristín on the Dingle Peninsula is one such site: a circular earthwork that has vanished from the landscape entirely, surviving now only in old maps and survey notes. What those sources preserve is modest but specific. The Ordnance Survey recorded it as a univallate enclosure, meaning a single-ditched and embanked ringfort of the kind that was once the most common form of rural settlement across early medieval Ireland, typically enclosing a farmstead and its associated structures within an earthen ring. Inside the enclosure, surveyors noted the remains of a circular ruin.

The site sat at the base of the southern slopes of Knockmoylemore, and its recorded diameter was approximately 40 metres, or about two chains in the older measurement. That detail comes from the Ordnance Survey Name Books, a nineteenth-century series of field notebooks compiled to record placename spellings and local topography across Ireland, and was later drawn on by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a substantial inventory of the area's prehistoric and early historic remains. The Irish placename Lios Coille, suggesting a fortified enclosure associated with woodland, hints at a landscape that has itself changed considerably since anyone last saw the earthwork intact.

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