Ringfort (Rath), Clydagh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Clydagh, Co. Kerry

There is nothing left to see at Clydagh.

The ringfort that once stood here, a subcircular earthwork enclosure of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period as a farmstead or defended homestead, was levelled sometime in the early 1970s during land reclamation works. What had survived for perhaps a thousand years or more did not survive the decade.

Before it disappeared, the site was recorded on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, positioned at the junction of four field boundaries on poor ground to the north of Macgillycuddy's Reeks, the mountain range that dominates the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry. Its precise age and the details of whoever built or lived within it are not known. What the map captured was its shape and its location, and that is now the most complete record that remains. The loss was not unusual for the period. Land reclamation across Ireland during the mid-twentieth century erased a significant number of earthwork monuments, many of which had no formal protection and sat on marginal agricultural ground where drainage and clearance work offered genuine economic incentive to farmers. A rath, as these ringforts are also called, typically consisted of a circular or near-circular bank and ditch enclosing a domestic area, and many hundreds still survive across the country. This one does not.

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