Ringfort (Rath), Ballyhenry, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
There is a particular kind of absence that only maps can reveal.
At Ballyhenry in north County Kerry, a ringfort once occupied the landscape long enough to be recorded on Ordnance Survey maps in the 1840s, to survive into the twentieth century, and to show up clearly on aerial photographs taken in 1977. Then, sometime before 2013, it was levelled. Nothing remains on the surface. The site exists now only in cartographic memory.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, the remains of enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They usually consist of one or more circular earthen banks and ditches surrounding a domestic area. The Ballyhenry example was visible as a circular enclosure on both the 1841 to 1842 and the 1916 Ordnance Survey maps, meaning it endured as a recognisable earthwork for at least the full span of documented Irish cartography. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded it as site number 531, drawing on that mapping evidence and the 1977 aerial photography from the Geological Survey of Ireland. At the time of that publication, the site was presumably still intact, or at least partially so.
What makes Ballyhenry notable is less what it was than what happened to it. The levelling of ringforts, often to reclaim agricultural land, has been a persistent problem across Ireland despite legal protections for recorded monuments. This particular site, traceable across more than a century of maps and visible from the air as recently as the late 1970s, is now without any surface trace. Visiting would yield nothing to the eye, which is itself a kind of information.