Ringfort (Rath), Carhoonakineely, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
At Carhoonakineely on the north Kerry coast, there is a ringfort that exists almost entirely on paper.
The site carries all the geographical logic of early medieval settlement, an elevated coastal position with clear sightlines in every direction, yet there is nothing left to see. No earthwork, no ditch, no raised interior platform. The place where a rath once stood, or was thought to stand, is simply open ground.
A rath was a type of ringfort typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches enclosing a roughly circular area, used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. The first Ordnance Survey mapping of the area, carried out in 1841 to 1842, recorded the site as a possible univallate rath, meaning a single-banked enclosure. The qualifier "possible" is telling; the surveyors were cautious even then. By the time the later edition of the map was produced, the site had been dropped from the record entirely, and today no surface trace survives. Whether the feature had already been levelled by agricultural activity before the first survey, or whether it was always a marginal or misidentified marking, is not clear. What remains is a coastal location that made obvious sense for settlement, and a cartographic ghost that did not survive revision.