Ringfort (Rath), Lecarhoo, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In the pastureland of Lecarhoo, a low earthen ring sits quietly in a field, doing double duty as an ancient enclosure and a modern boundary marker.
The two roles are not entirely separate. The surviving bank of this rath, a type of circular earthwork farmstead built predominantly during the early medieval period in Ireland, has been absorbed into the working field system around it, its outline now partly expressed in the hedges and divisions that farmers have maintained for generations. That kind of continuity is easy to overlook, but it is also one of the more telling things about how the Irish landscape was shaped and re-shaped across centuries without ever quite erasing what came before.
The rath occupies a roughly circular area of approximately 34 metres in diameter on a gentle slope facing north-northeast. What remains of the enclosing bank survives most clearly along the northern to south-southeastern arc, where it still stands around a metre high on the interior and slightly more on the exterior face, with a width of about 1.35 metres. Along the western and northwestern arc, the definition is less pronounced, reduced to a slight scarp. The interior ground slopes down toward the north-northwest, and there is a cattle break on the eastern side. Ordnance Survey mapping from 1846 recorded the enclosure as roughly circular and somewhat larger, at about 40 metres across. By 1894, the same feature was mapped as a slightly oval shape and already shown as incorporated into the surrounding field boundaries, suggesting that even by the late nineteenth century the monument had become partly functionalised rather than simply preserved.