Ringfort, Ballylarkin, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ringforts
A road quietly erased part of an early medieval settlement at Ballylarkin in County Kilkenny, and what remains has since sunk so far into the surrounding farmland that a visitor in 1987 found little more than a faint arc of stony bank curving through the grass.
That curved remnant is all that survives above ground of what was once a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used throughout Ireland roughly between the fourth and twelfth centuries, typically consisting of a circular bank and ditch enclosing a homestead and its outbuildings.
The first Ordnance Survey mapping of 1839 recorded the site clearly as a roughly circular enclosure, measuring approximately 35 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west. By the time the OS returned for the 1900 revision, the outline was still legible on the map, though the southern quadrant had already been cut through by an east-west road running along that side. The land around it had long been reclaimed for agriculture, and the fort itself sits on a terrace of a north-facing slope, its earthworks gradually absorbed into the managed, grassy landscape around it. When the site was examined in 1987, only the western to northern to eastern arc of the original bank survived, levelled to a width of roughly four metres and barely distinguishable from the ground around it.