Ringfort (Rath), Leamnaguila, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On a south-west-facing slope in Leamnaguila, County Kerry, a slight hollow in the pasture is almost all that remains of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, typically a circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period.
The depression, roughly 24 metres across, sits within an area of grazing land and would be easy to overlook entirely, which is part of what makes it worth knowing about.
The 1894 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a roughly circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately 30 metres, suggesting it was still legible in the landscape at that point, even if already degraded. By the time of more recent survey work, the earthworks had been levelled, leaving only the concave ground surface as evidence of what had been there. The slight shrinkage in the visible diameter, from around 30 metres on the map to around 24 metres on the ground, is a quiet measure of how much can disappear in a century of agricultural use. Raths of this size are common across Ireland, where thousands were built between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries, serving as enclosed homesteads for farming families. Most have survived only partially, and a good number, like this one, exist now as little more than a change in the texture of the ground.