Ringfort (Rath), Moybella, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In the townland of Moybella in north Kerry, a ringfort once stood.
Not the stone-walled, heather-edged kind that still punctuates the Irish landscape in satisfying abundance, but one that has been erased so thoroughly that nothing remains at ground level. No earthen bank, no ditch, no faint circular depression in the grass. The site exists now only in the documentary record, a ghost outline traced across successive generations of maps and one set of aerial photographs.
A rath, to use the Irish term, was typically a circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, used during the early medieval period as a farmstead or high-status residence. This one in Moybella was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 and again on the revised edition of 1914, suggesting it was at least partially visible as a surface feature well into the twentieth century. By 1974, when the Geological Survey of Ireland flew aerial photography over the area, the enclosure could still be detected from the air, even if it was becoming difficult to read on foot. Aerial photography of this kind routinely reveals cropmarks or soil discolouration invisible at ground level, allowing archaeologists to confirm the shape and extent of features that have otherwise been ploughed or levelled away. Sometime between that 1974 survey and more recent inspection, the last traces disappeared entirely. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, catalogued it among a broader sweep of monuments across the region, and it is from that work that the site's documented history is drawn.