Ringfort (Rath), Kilcandra, Co. Wicklow

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Kilcandra, Co. Wicklow

There is a particular kind of historical loss that leaves almost no trace, not even ruins, only a shape on an old map and a few lines in a nineteenth-century letter.

A ringfort in Kilcandra, County Wicklow, sits at precisely that vanishing point. Where once a circular earthen enclosure of around forty-five metres in diameter occupied a level shelf on a south-east-facing slope, there is now nothing visible at ground level at all.

Ringforts, sometimes called raths, were the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen banks enclosing a farmstead. The Kilcandra example was recorded in the OS Letters of 1928, drawn from observations made during the original Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the nineteenth century, and the account preserved by O'Flanagan describes a bank still standing about 1.20 metres high at the time of that earlier survey. It was also marked with hachures on the first-edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map, the standard way of indicating an earthwork in the field. Ronan, writing in 1928, placed its destruction in 1830, suggesting it was deliberately levelled, most likely for agricultural improvement. By the time inspectors visited the site in 1990, no surface trace remained. What makes the place quietly stranger still is the local tradition that a church once stood within the enclosure itself, a detail that, if accurate, would point to a site of some ecclesiastical as well as domestic significance in the early medieval landscape of Wicklow.

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