Enclosure, Garryantanvally, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Some archaeological sites are remarkable for what they contain.
This one in Garryantanvally, County Kerry, is remarkable for what it no longer does. Recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 as a sub-circular enclosure, the kind of roughly oval or rounded earthwork that in Ireland often marks a former ringfort or early settlement boundary, it had already been partially compromised by a fieldbank running east to west across its southern side. By the time the next comparable survey came around in 1939, the site had disappeared from the map entirely. Today, nothing survives on the ground.
That gap between 1842 and 1939 tells a quiet story about land use and agricultural pressure in rural Kerry. The enclosure was, in a sense, already losing the battle when it was first officially recorded; a field boundary cutting through its southern arc suggests that whoever farmed the land found practical use more pressing than preservation. Over the following century, whatever earthwork remained was levelled completely, leaving only a cartographic ghost in the earlier Ordnance Survey sheets. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, captured this trajectory, noting the site's presence in historical mapping and its total absence in the present landscape.