Ringfort (Rath), Clogher, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Clogher, Co. Kerry

Near Clogher in north Kerry, there was once a large circular earthwork that appeared on Ordnance Survey maps for over seventy years, was captured in aerial photography, and then simply ceased to exist.

The site, a rath or ringfort, belongs to a class of enclosed farmsteads common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches thrown up around a homestead. What makes this one quietly notable is the trajectory of its disappearance: documented, photographed, and then levelled, it now exists only in cartographic and archival memory.

The enclosure was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps produced during the 1841 to 1842 survey and again on the revised 1914 to 1915 edition, suggesting it remained a recognisable feature of the landscape for generations. Its scale was significant enough that it straddled two separate OS six-inch map sheets, indicating a substantial circumference. By 1974 it was still visible from the air, appearing in aerial photography compiled by the Geological Survey of Ireland. At some point after that, the earthwork was levelled, most likely through agricultural land improvement, a fate that befell a great many ringforts across Ireland during the latter decades of the twentieth century, when land reclamation and mechanised farming reshaped the countryside at speed. Its existence in north Kerry was catalogued in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by Brandon in association with FÁS, a volume that remains one of the more systematic records of the region's field monuments.

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Pete F
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