Ringfort (Rath), Lissahane, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lissahane, Co. Kerry

A road running east to west through the North Kerry landscape has, over time, quietly erased the northern arc of what was once a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used as a farmstead or defended homestead during the early medieval period.

What survives at Lissahane is less a monument than an absence, a site that appears on two generations of Ordnance Survey maps but has since vanished entirely from the surface of the land.

The rath at Lissahane was classified as possibly univallate, meaning it may have had a single enclosing bank, and it sat one field east of a neighbouring recorded site. It was documented in the 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey mapping and again in the 1914 to 1915 revision, suggesting it was still at least partially legible in the landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. By the time C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey was published in 1995, no surface trace remained. The road that cut through its northern sector likely accelerated the degradation of whatever earthworks had endured, with agricultural activity and time doing the rest.

There is nothing to see at the site today, which is itself a kind of point. The Lissahane rath is useful precisely as an example of how comprehensively an ancient enclosure can disappear, leaving only its cartographic ghost on maps that are now themselves historical documents.

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Pete F
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