Ringfort (Rath), Lahard, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
What survives at Lahard is less the site itself than the memory of what was there.
On a south-facing slope above the valley of the River Laune in County Kerry, a low circular rise in the pasture, roughly 36 metres across, is all that remains of what local accounts describe as a once-substantial bivallate rath, a type of early medieval ringfort defined by two concentric earthen banks with a deep ditch, known as a fosse, running between them. That combination of double defences would have marked this out as a more prominent enclosure than the single-banked variety more commonly found across the Irish countryside, suggesting a site of some local significance in its day.
The 1895 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the rath as a roughly circular enclosure measuring approximately 60 metres in diameter, considerably larger than the modest undulation visible today. The difference between those two figures tells its own quiet story. According to local information, the banks and fosse were levelled during the 1970s, reducing a legible piece of early medieval landscape to a faint shadow in the ground. The loss was substantial: where two banks and an intervening ditch once gave the site both physical presence and topographic drama, there is now only a slight swelling in the field, easy to walk past without a second glance.
The site sits in pasture and overlooks the broad valley of the River Laune, which drains Lough Leane eastward toward Killorglin. That orientation, south-facing and commanding a view down into the valley, is typical of rath placement, where visibility and aspect seem to have mattered as much as the quality of the ground underfoot. The contrast between what the old map shows and what the eye can now find on the slope is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about the place.