Ringfort (Rath), Huntstown, Co. Kilkenny

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Huntstown, Co. Kilkenny

By the time anyone thought to record it properly, most of this ringfort in Huntstown, Co. Kilkenny had already vanished.

What survived into the mid-twentieth century was only the north-east quadrant of what had once been a circular earthen enclosure, its inner bank still thick with thorn trees and showing signs of having been disturbed by digging. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath, is a roughly circular enclosure bounded by an earthen bank and ditch, used as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. At Huntstown, even that partial remnant did not last.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, produced in 1839, recorded a D-shaped enclosure at the site measuring approximately 50 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and around 17 metres across the shorter span, with a field boundary running along the western side. Surveyors at the time may have been seeing only the eastern portion of a much larger original structure. By the 1900 revision of the same map series, the enclosure had been omitted entirely, suggesting significant deterioration or clearance had occurred in the intervening decades. A 1951 description confirms what little remained: an outer ditch, an inner bank, thorn growth, and evidence of interference. Shortly afterwards, whatever was left was removed as part of the Land Project, a mid-century government programme that incentivised the improvement and reclamation of agricultural land across Ireland, and which claimed a considerable number of earthworks and monuments in the process.

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