Ringfort (Rath), Rosnacartan Beg, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Rosnacartan Beg, Co. Kerry

There is a ringfort in Rosnacartan Beg, County Kerry, that you cannot see.

Standing in the pasture on its west-facing slope, nothing announces itself to the eye; no earthen bank, no ditch, no raised outline in the grass. The site survives only as a cartographic ghost, its existence confirmed not by anything visible underfoot but by a map drawn in 1895.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of that year recorded a circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, belonging to a class of monument known as a rath. A rath is an early medieval farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches, the dwelling place of a farming family of some local standing, typically dating from between the sixth and twelfth centuries. What the 1895 surveyors recorded has since been largely erased at ground level. The southern portion of the enclosure was cut away by an east-west field boundary, a common enough fate for sites that sat inconveniently across later land divisions. A second rath survives approximately 70 metres to the east, suggesting this part of Kerry was once a settled, organised landscape, with homesteads positioned in proximity to one another on the hillside.

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Pete F
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