Ringfort (Rath), Lahard, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lahard, Co. Kerry

In the pastureland of Lahard, on a gently sloping hillside facing south-east, lies a ringfort that has effectively disappeared into its own ground.

There is no bank to climb, no ditch to peer into; only a low rise in the grass, roughly thirty-five metres across, hints that anything was ever here at all. A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval period. That this one has sunk so completely below the surface makes it an oddly compelling case, a place whose significance is almost entirely historical rather than visible.

The site was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, where it appeared as a circular enclosure of approximately forty metres in diameter, so the outline was legible within living memory of the survey. More intriguingly, a Schools Manuscript collected in Kerry in the 1940s places this rath in a field belonging to a Kelly's farm, alongside a second ringfort of the same kind, the two lying about two hundred yards apart. The manuscript describes one of the pair as being very big, with two earthen circular rings, and the other as a single ring fort. If this site is indeed the smaller of the two, its now-invisible companion, recorded separately, may preserve more of those original earthworks. Two ringforts sharing the same field is an unusual arrangement, and the detail of double concentric rings on the larger one suggests it was a site of some status in its time, perhaps indicating the home of a more prosperous farming family in early medieval Ireland.

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Pete F
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