Ringfort (Rath), Anglont, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Anglont, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Anglont in County Kerry, there is a place where a ringfort once stood, and now does not.

A rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthwork enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period, once occupied a level stretch of south-facing pasture here, measuring around 35 metres in diameter. By the mid-1990s, according to local information, it had been levelled, along with a second rath that sat approximately 80 metres to the south-east. Two ancient enclosures, erased within living memory.

What makes the loss slightly more legible is the paper trail left by earlier surveyors. The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site clearly as a circular enclosure, and noted a trigonometrical station, one of the fixed survey points used in the great nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland, sitting on its bank at the west-south-west. In the 1840s, fieldworkers compiling the Ordnance Survey Name Books noted that there were two forts towards the eastern part of the townland, one unnamed and the other known as "Angles or Lissknocknaholla". The name itself carries weight, with "Liss" being a common Irish prefix for a fort or enclosure. There is a small complication, though: on the 1846 map, the name "Lissknocknahulla" was applied not to this rath but to its neighbour to the south-east, leaving some ambiguity about which site carried which name, and why the two were recorded differently across sources separated by only a few years.

Nothing survives above ground to visit. The pasture that covers the site shows no trace of what the mid-nineteenth-century mapmakers recorded with quiet precision, and the second rath nearby met the same fate. What remains is a set of coordinates, a name that shifted between documents, and the outline of a 35-metre circle on a map that is now older than anyone alive.

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Pete F
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