Ringfort (Rath), An Gráig, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), An Gráig, Co. Kerry

On the northern slope of the Sea Hill ridge, near the eastern end above the Lispole valley in County Kerry, there is a ringfort that exists only on paper.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map records a circular univallate enclosure here, a single-banked ringfort of the kind built throughout Ireland during the early medieval period, typically serving as a farmstead or the defended residence of a local family of some standing. But on the ground today, there is nothing to see. No earthwork, no trace of a bank or ditch, nothing to interrupt the grass.

The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a detailed inventory of the antiquities of Corca Dhuibhne. At the time of that survey, the enclosure had already vanished from the landscape, its location known only through what the nineteenth-century mapmakers had recorded. The ridge position would have made good sense for such a structure; ringforts were often placed to take advantage of natural elevation, and the view over the Lispole valley from this spot is considerable. Whether the earthwork was levelled by agricultural improvement, eroded gradually over the centuries, or simply misidentified in the original mapping is not recorded.

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