Settlement deserted - medieval, Rattoo, Co. Kerry

Nothing marks it now. The ground has been tilled for so long that any earthworks are gone, and the name Rattoo, a worn-down version of the Irish Rath maigi tuaidh, meaning the fort of the northern plain, is about as much as the landscape gives away. What makes the place quietly arresting is the gap between what it once was and what the census of 1659 recorded: a total population of six people in the townland of Rattoo, and twelve in the adjoining townland of Burgessland. A borough, in the medieval sense, was a formally planted town with defined plots called burgages and the legal privileges to match. By the mid-seventeenth century, Rattoo's had collapsed so thoroughly that Sir Richard Cox, writing in 1887, dismissed it as "a poor inconsiderable village of small note".

The site has a layered past that makes the eventual silence stranger still. There was almost certainly an early ecclesiastical settlement here from as far back as the sixth century, possibly associated with a Bishop Lughach, and the presence of a round tower, the kind of tall stone structure built to signal the wealth and status of an early Irish monastic community, confirms that this was once a place of some consequence. The Anglo-Normans appear to have recognised as much. Around 1210, King John granted much of north Kerry to Meiler Fitzhenry, and it was likely in the decades following that a borough was planted here, probably because the existing church site already gave it coherence and local standing. A hospital dedicated to St. John the Baptist, run by the Fratres Cruciferi, a religious order of canons known as the Crutched Friars, was also founded at Rattoo by one Saivinus, son of Cynan. Documentary references thin out sharply after that. In 1594, six messuages, meaning dwelling houses with adjoining land, were granted to an Edmund Barret. In 1597, a burgage plot formerly held by Arrousians was granted to Trinity College Dublin. The Civil Survey of 1654 mentions lands and tenements held mainly by Morris McDaniell, and notes, with some specificity, "two house Roomes nere the west end of the Church of Rathowe." That phrase, precise and oddly melancholy, is the last real topographical trace of Rattoo as a functioning settlement.