Ringfort (Rath), Booleenshare, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Some places are most interesting for what has ceased to exist.
At Booleenshare in north County Kerry, a ringfort, or rath, was once substantial enough to be mapped by Ordnance Survey cartographers in 1842, complete with a notation marking a cave within its interior. Today, no visible trace of either survives. What remains is essentially a cartographic memory, a site known only through the evidence of old maps and the faint logic of field boundaries.
Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, circular enclosures typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, and used during the early medieval period primarily as farmsteads. The cave notation on the 1842 map most likely refers to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage commonly associated with ringforts and thought to have served for storage or as a place of refuge. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its mapping in 1916, the enclosure itself had disappeared from the record, though the shapes of surrounding fieldbanks still hinted at a sub-circular form beneath the reorganised landscape. It is C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, that brings these two moments together and allows what the maps imply to be read as a sequence of gradual erasure rather than simple absence.
Nothing at ground level now betrays the site's former presence, and there is no feature for a visitor to identify with confidence. Its interest lies entirely in that gap between the 1842 record and the 1916 one, a short window in which a monument that had survived for over a millennium was finally levelled into the surrounding farmland.