Ringfort (Rath), Ballycasheen, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballycasheen, Co. Kerry

Beneath the caravans and hard-standing of a holiday park on the northern bank of the Flesk River in County Kerry, there may lie the ghost of an early medieval homestead.

A rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, is a roughly circular earthen enclosure that once served as a farmstead and place of security, typically dating from the early medieval period. This particular example is no longer visible at ground level, its banks and ditches long since levelled, leaving nothing for the eye to catch.

The evidence for its existence comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, which shows a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter at this location. That survey, one of the most detailed cartographic exercises ever undertaken in Ireland at the time, captured field boundaries, earthworks, and archaeological features that in many cases have since vanished. The enclosure at Ballycasheen appears to belong to that category, surviving only as an ink line on nineteenth-century paper rather than as any physical presence on the ground. Whether it was a true rath or something else entirely remains uncertain, which is why it carries the cautious designation of "possible" in the archaeological record.

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