Ringfort (Rath), Ballymacaquim, Co. Kerry

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Ringfort (Rath), Ballymacaquim, Co. Kerry

There is a particular melancholy to a place that exists only on paper.

At Ballymacaquim in north County Kerry, a large circular earthwork once occupied the landscape, visible enough to be mapped by Ordnance Survey cartographers working in 1841 to 1842 and still present when their successors recorded it again in 1916. By the time it was documented in the early twenty-first century, however, it had been levelled, and no surface trace whatsoever survives. The site is, in a practical sense, gone.

The structure in question was a rath, the Irish term for a ringfort, which is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. These were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically associated with farming families of some local standing, and they appear in their thousands across the country. Most that survive are protected; many others were cleared from farmland over the centuries, particularly during periods of agricultural intensification. The Ballymacaquim example is described as large, which would have made its removal a significant undertaking. The fact that it still appeared on the 1916 map suggests it endured well into the modern period before being levelled, most likely sometime in the mid-2000s if the dating given at the time of its documentation is taken as a guide.

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