Ringfort (Rath), Ballyconnell, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Ballyconnell, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Ballyconnell in north Kerry, a ringfort once occupied the landscape well enough to be mapped twice by the Ordnance Survey.

Today, nothing of it remains above ground. No earthen bank, no trace of a circular enclosure, no hint of the domestic life that these early medieval farmsteads, known in Irish as raths, were built to contain and protect. The site exists now only as a cartographic memory.

The fort appears on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 and again on the revised edition of 1898, but by that later date something had already begun to work against it. A fieldbank running roughly north to south had been cut straight through the enclosure, bisecting it. That kind of intervention, a boundary ditch or wall driven across an older feature in the course of agricultural reorganisation, is one of the more common ways that ringforts have been erased from the Irish countryside over the past two centuries. Whatever earthworks had survived into the Victorian period did not survive much beyond it, and the site has left no surface trace at all.

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Pete F
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