Ringfort (Rath), Tullaghna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ringforts
In the townland of Tullaghna in north County Kerry, a ringfort once existed that now leaves no mark whatsoever on the ground.
The earthwork has vanished so completely that the only record of its location comes from nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ordnance Survey maps, where a circular enclosure is clearly marked to the north-east of a neighbouring site. Today, there is nothing to see.
Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, defined by one or more circular earthen banks and ditches surrounding a domestic interior. Many thousands were built across Ireland, and while a great number survive in various states of decay, others have been lost entirely to ploughing, land improvement, and the slow attrition of centuries of farming. The Tullaghna example appears on both the 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey mapping and again on the 1916 revision, suggesting it was still recognisable as a feature in the landscape into the early twentieth century. At some point after that, whatever earthworks remained were levelled. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded it as a circular enclosure with no surface trace surviving.
What makes this site quietly notable is precisely its absence. It exists now only as a cartographic ghost, a circle drawn on old maps that corresponds to nothing a visitor could stand beside or photograph. The Kerry landscape holds many such erasures, places where the archaeological record and the physical ground have parted company entirely.