Ringfort (Rath), Cadamstown, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Cadamstown, Co. Kildare

There is a ringfort recorded near Cadamstown in County Kildare that, by 1985, had ceased to exist in any visible sense. No bank, no ditch, no earthwork of any kind remained above ground. What survives instead is a cartographic ghost, a circle inked onto the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, marking a circular enclosure of roughly 70 metres in diameter on a gently sloping, south-facing piece of pasture.

Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a circular area enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used as a farmstead or place of habitation. Thousands survive across the country in varying states of preservation. This one in Cadamstown apparently did not fare so well. By the time any formal field inspection was carried out, the monument had been entirely absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape, most likely levelled by ploughing or land improvement over the intervening century and a half since the Ordnance Survey team recorded it. The 1838 map remains the only direct evidence that anything was ever there.

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Pete F
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