Ringfort (Rath), Ballymakegoge, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In the Kerry landscape near Ballymakegoge, a circular earthwork sits in the ground that is, depending on how you count, somewhere between one and two thousand years old.
It is a rath, the most common type of monument surviving in the Irish countryside, built as an enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. A rath typically consists of a raised circular bank of earth, sometimes accompanied by a fosse or external ditch, enclosing a living area perhaps thirty to forty metres across. At their most elaborate, they were ringed by multiple banks; at their simplest, a single earthen wall separated a family's dwelling from the open land beyond. That so many survive at all, unexcavated and largely undisturbed, says something about how thoroughly they became absorbed into the field boundaries and folklore of rural Ireland.
The placename Ballymakegoge offers its own quiet interest. The Bally prefix derives from the Irish baile, a townland or homestead, a word applied to thousands of land divisions across the country. The remainder likely preserves a personal name, in the way that countless Kerry townlands encode the memory of a family or individual long since dissolved from any written record. Whether this particular rath was the original seat of that household, or simply one of several enclosures on the same land, is the kind of question that would require excavation to answer. Ringforts of this type were not defended in any serious military sense; they were domestic spaces, their banks functioning as much to define ownership and keep livestock in as to deter any genuine threat.
Because detailed records for this specific site have not yet been made publicly available, its precise dimensions, condition, and any known finds remain undocumented in accessible sources. What can be said is that Kerry holds hundreds of such monuments, many of them still visible as low earthen rings in farmland or under scrub, easy to walk past without recognising what they are. The rath at Ballymakegoge is one data point in that much larger pattern of early medieval rural settlement, a pattern that, field by field, shaped the landscape that later centuries inherited.