Enclosure, Lacka More, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In the fields of Lacka More in north County Kerry, there was once a sub-circular enclosure, the kind of roughly rounded earthwork that appears in countless corners of the Irish landscape, often the remnant of an early medieval farmstead or a cattle enclosure from centuries past.
What makes this particular site quietly striking is not what it was, but what it became: nothing. It vanished entirely, leaving no surface trace, no ridge in the grass, no shadow in a low winter sun.
The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, appearing four fields south-west of a neighbouring recorded site. At the time of that survey it was already being crossed by a bohareen, the Irish term for a narrow rural lane or track, running in a north-east to south-west direction through or across the monument. By the time the next major OS revision came around in 1898, the site had disappeared from the map altogether, and fieldwork since has confirmed that nothing remains on the ground. The bohareen that once cut through it may itself have contributed to the gradual erosion of whatever earthen bank or ditch had defined the enclosure, though the land improvements and agricultural changes of the nineteenth century account for the loss of many such sites across Ireland.