Ringfort (Rath), Leataoibh Meánach, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
On the Ordnance Survey maps, a fort is marked near the foot of the north-eastern slopes of Lateevemore, overlooking Smerwick Harbour on the Dingle Peninsula.
Go looking for it today and you will find nothing. No earthwork, no ditch, no trace of the oval enclosure that cartographers once considered worth recording. It is, in the most literal sense, an absence on the landscape.
What the maps once showed was a univallate ringfort, meaning a roughly circular or oval enclosure defined by a single raised bank or earthen wall. These structures were built across Ireland throughout the early medieval period, typically serving as farmsteads or defended homesteads for local families of some standing. The example at Leataoibh Meánach was oval in plan and sat at the foot of the Lateevemore hillside, positioned where it would have looked out over the harbour. Its entry in the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey compiled by J. Cuppage in 1986 records it under the category of rath, the Irish term for this type of earthen enclosure, and notes that even by then no visible remains survived. The site had been recorded on the Ordnance Survey's Fair Plan, the detailed working drawings produced during the nineteenth-century mapping of Ireland, which suggests the enclosure was at least partially intact at that point. Whatever was there has since been levelled, most likely by agricultural activity over the intervening generations.