Ringfort, Mulgeeth, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Ringforts
Somewhere on a north-west-facing slope in Mulgeeth, County Kildare, a ringfort once sat in the pasture, its circular earthen bank enclosing a space roughly 35 metres across. A ringfort is a broadly Iron Age to early medieval form of defended farmstead, typically consisting of a raised bank and ditch surrounding a domestic area, and they are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland. This one, however, has effectively ceased to exist in any visible sense.
The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, produced in 1838, recorded it clearly as a circular enclosure. By the time the same mapping series was revised in 1911, the monument had already been dropped from the record, suggesting it had been levelled or built over in the intervening decades. Today, a modern house and its associated garden and small fields occupy the southern portion of the site, and nothing remains visible at ground level. The enclosure exists now only as a cartographic ghost, present on one map and gone from the next, with the slope continuing to be worked as pasture around it.