Ringfort (Rath), Ballydonohoe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Some of the most interesting archaeological sites in Ireland are not the ones you can see, but the ones you cannot.
At Ballydonohoe in north County Kerry, a ringfort once stood that has since been erased so thoroughly from the landscape that nothing visible remains at ground level. Known by the Irish name Lios Maol, meaning roughly "flat fort", it belongs to a category of earthwork enclosure, the rath or ringfort, that was once among the most common features of the Irish countryside. These were typically circular banks and ditches enclosing a farmstead or small settlement, built predominantly during the early medieval period. Thousands survive across Ireland in various states of preservation. This one does not.
The site appeared on Ordnance Survey maps from the 1841 to 1842 survey and again on the 1914 edition, suggesting it was still sufficiently visible in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to be recorded by cartographers. At some point between 1914 and the mid-twentieth century it was levelled entirely, most likely through agricultural clearance. By 1974, when the Geological Survey of Ireland carried out aerial photography of the region, the fort had vanished from the surface but could still be detected from the air, its outline preserved as a crop or soil mark invisible to anyone standing in the field. C. Toal documented the site in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, noting its location to the south-east of a neighbouring recorded monument.
There is nothing to see here in any conventional sense, and that absence is itself the point. The place survives only as a name, a map reference, and a shadow legible only to cameras pointed downward from aircraft.