Ringfort (Rath), Lissycurrig, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Lissycurrig, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites are remarkable for what they contain.

This one is remarkable for containing nothing at all, and for having apparently vanished between one Ordnance Survey map and the next. A circular enclosure at Lissycurrig in north Kerry was recorded on the 1841 to 1842 OS mapping, the great mid-nineteenth-century survey that captured the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail. By the time the later edition was produced, it was gone, and today no surface trace survives.

The site would originally have been a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which was the most common form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. Typically earthen, consisting of one or more concentric banks and ditches enclosing a farmstead, raths were built and occupied roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries, and tens of thousands once dotted the countryside. The Lissycurrig example was evidently already reduced to little more than a cropmark or faint earthwork by the time the first OS surveyors passed through, and whatever remained was lost entirely in the decades that followed, most likely through agricultural improvement, land clearance, or simple erosion. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, is the source that preserves what little is known about it.

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