Ringfort (Rath), Ahascra, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Ahascra, Co. Kerry

There is something quietly melancholy about a site that survives only in cartography.

Near Ahascra in County Kerry, a circular ringfort, known in Irish as a rath, once occupied a patch of ground that has since been completely levelled. A rath is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and thousands of them survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. This one does not.

The site appeared on Ordnance Survey maps produced during the 1841 to 1842 primary survey, and again on the revised mapping of 1939, indicating it was still recognisable as a feature for nearly a century of modern cartographic record. By the time of the Geological Survey of Ireland's aerial photography programme in 1977, the circular outline could still be detected from the air, though even then a fieldbank had already cut into its western side. Somewhere between that aerial survey and the present day, the remainder was lost entirely, likely to agricultural improvement or land consolidation of the kind that has erased a significant proportion of Ireland's earthwork archaeology over the past several decades. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site as entry number 377, preserving at least its existence and rough form for the historical record even as the ground itself told a different story.

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