Ringfort (Rath), Gortnaskeha, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Gortnaskeha, Co. Kerry

There is nothing to see at Gortnaskeha, and that absence is precisely the point.

Where a ringfort once stood, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or settlement, the ground is now level and unremarkable. The site has been so thoroughly erased that no surface trace remains, yet it carries one of the more evocative place-names in North Kerry: Lisnasplank, or Lios na Splanc, meaning the fort of the flashes of lightning.

The ringfort appears clearly on Ordnance Survey maps from both the 1841 to 1842 survey and the 1914 to 1915 revision, recorded each time as a circular enclosure. At some point after that second mapping, roughly sixty years before the site was documented in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey of 1995, it was levelled entirely. The destruction of ringforts through agricultural improvement was common across twentieth-century Ireland, as earthen banks were seen as obstacles to tillage or grazing rather than as remnants of a settlement landscape stretching back well over a thousand years. What makes Gortnaskeha linger is the name itself. Lios na Splanc suggests the place held some quality, real or imagined, that people associated with lightning long before any Ordnance Survey cartographer arrived to trace its outline on paper.

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