Lischamneel, Ballydunlea, Co. Kerry

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Lischamneel, Ballydunlea, Co. Kerry

On the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841, a small but legible annotation marks a site in Ballydunlea, County Kerry, with the name Lischamneel.

Beside it, the cartographer recorded something worth pausing over: a circular earthwork roughly 31 metres in diameter, with a rectangular building sitting at its centre, aligned east to west. The care taken to record both the enclosure and the internal structure suggests that, at the time of the survey, the place still read clearly on the ground. It no longer does.

The "lis" element in the place name points toward the Irish word for an enclosure or fortified homestead, the kind of circular earthen ringfort that was the standard form of rural settlement across Ireland from the early medieval period onward. Such enclosures typically defined a farmstead, with the raised bank and ditch serving as a boundary against livestock and, to a degree, as a marker of social status. The rectangular building recorded at the centre of this particular example, oriented east to west, is harder to interpret without more detail, though east-west alignment is a feature associated with ecclesiastical as well as domestic buildings. What is certain is that by the time a field inspection was carried out in the twentieth century, the enclosure had been levelled, its earthworks reduced to the point where the site no longer survives as an upstanding monument. What the 1841 map preserved in ink, the intervening years erased from the land.

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