Ringfort (Rath), Clievragh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
At Clievragh in County Kerry, there is a place recorded on Ordnance Survey maps as the site of a ringfort, the circular earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead and place of protection for an early medieval family, typically defined by one or more raised banks and ditches.
Nothing of it survives. A modern building now occupies the ground where the earthwork once stood, and no trace of the original structure remains visible at the surface.
The enclosure appeared on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, meaning cartographers working through that great nineteenth-century mapping project considered it sufficiently intact to record. It was still marked on the revised OS map of 1939, suggesting it was recognisable as a feature well into the twentieth century. At some point after that survey, the earthwork was levelled entirely. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, documents it under the category of rath, the Irish term commonly used for this type of earthen ringfort, and notes its complete obliteration. The site at Clievragh is one of many such losses across the Irish countryside, where ringforts that had persisted for over a thousand years were cleared during periods of agricultural intensification or development in the latter half of the twentieth century.