Ringfort (Rath), Leagh, Co. Kerry

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Leagh, Co. Kerry

Some places survive only on paper.

In the townland of Leagh in north County Kerry, a ringfort once occupied a patch of ground recorded on Ordnance Survey maps as a neat circular enclosure, yet today not a single earthwork, bank, or hollow marks where it stood. The site is known by the Irish name Lios an tSruthaill, meaning the ringfort of the stream, and that name is now among the last things left of it.

Ringforts, known variously as raths or lios depending on local usage, were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They usually consisted of a circular bank of earth or stone surrounding a dwelling and its outbuildings, and they were once so common across Ireland that tens of thousands are thought to have existed. Lissatrowel appeared on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 and again on the revised edition of 1915 to 1916, both times as a legible circular feature. At some point between those surveys and the present day, it vanished entirely from the landscape, most likely through agricultural clearance. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded the site and noted that no surface trace survives.

What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost, a place that can be located on a historical map but not in the field. The Irish placename preserves a detail, a stream nearby, that the land itself no longer offers up.

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