Enclosure, Kilgulbin, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilgulbin, Co. Kerry

On the edge of Kilgulbin in north County Kerry, there is a site that exists now only in cartographic memory.

A circular enclosure, once mapped and named, has left no mark on the ground whatsoever. No earthen bank, no ditch, no subtle rise in the grass. The land has simply absorbed it.

The enclosure belongs to a cluster known as the Ballinhonick Forts, rendered in Irish as Liosanna Bhaile Sheonaic, meaning roughly the ringforts of the homestead of Seonac, the latter being a personal name. A ringfort, to give the term some context, is a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen or stone banks, the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland. This particular example was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 and again on the 1898 revision, sitting immediately north of a neighbouring enclosure that does still survive. Somewhere between those nineteenth-century surveys and the present day, it vanished entirely from the landscape, most likely through agricultural clearance. What the maps preserve, then, is not so much a monument as a silhouette of one, the outline of a place where someone called Seonac, or someone associated with that name, once kept a household.

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Pete F
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