Ringfort (Rath), Togherbane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
Some places earn their place in the archaeological record precisely because they no longer exist.
At Togherbane in north County Kerry, a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure that typically surrounded an early medieval farmstead, once occupied a defined position in the landscape. Today there is nothing to see. The site has been levelled, leaving no visible trace of the bank and ditch that would once have marked it out.
What makes this particular absence worth noting is how carefully the site was documented before it vanished. It appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1842 and again on the 1916 revision, meaning it survived into the twentieth century largely intact. By 1977, when the Geological Survey of Ireland captured the area in aerial photographs, it was still detectable from above, that birds-eye perspective that often reveals cropmarks and soil shadows invisible to anyone standing at ground level. Sometime after that, the enclosure was removed entirely, most likely through agricultural improvement or land clearance. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site and its fate, noting that it had lain to the east of two neighbouring monuments in the same townland.