Ringfort (Rath), Beal, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Beal, Co. Kerry

At Beal in north Kerry, there is a scheduled archaeological site with nothing left to see.

No earthworks, no banks, no ditches; just farmland where, according to every map and observer who came before, a substantial ringfort once stood.

The site has a reasonably well-documented decline. The Ordnance Survey map produced between 1841 and 1842 recorded a circular enclosure here, the standard form of a rath, an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. By the time the next detailed edition was produced, between 1914 and 1915, the cartographers were showing two concentric rings, suggesting either that the second bank had always been there and was only then properly recorded, or that the site's outline had somehow become more legible over the intervening decades. In 1909, the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited in person and described what he found as half of a two-ringed fort, meaning that even then the earthworks were already being lost. Westropp was a prolific recorder of ringforts and other field monuments across Munster, and his notes from this period are among the few first-hand accounts of sites that have since disappeared entirely. Today, no surface trace remains at all.

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Pete F
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