Enclosure, Garraun, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Garraun, Co. Kerry

In a field of level reclaimed pasture at the foot of a south-facing slope in Garraun, Co. Kerry, there is an enclosure that most people walking past would not recognise as anything other than a slight irregularity in the landscape.

A curved arc of stony bank, running roughly north-northwest to northeast, is the only part still standing to any meaningful height, and even that modest remnant, about 55 metres long, a metre wide, and a metre tall, is largely obscured by the rubble of field clearance. The rest of the structure survives mainly as a shape in old maps and in the ghostly geometry of a 1962 aerial photograph.

The overall form, as recorded on the 1892 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, was roughly D-shaped, approximately 70 metres across, with a straight southwest side. Within the interior, the aerial photograph revealed two short linear features meeting at right angles, possibly the surviving sides of a smaller rectangular enclosure tucked inside the main one. What makes the site quietly arresting is what is associated with it. A possible ogham stone sits nearby; ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are rendered as notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, most commonly used for personal names and found across Ireland and parts of Britain. There is also what may be a children's burial ground. Locally, the place is known as a killeen, a term used across Ireland for informal burial grounds where unbaptised infants were interred, often at the margins of settled or sacred land. The association of a killeen with an enclosure of this kind, and with a possible ogham stone, suggests the site carried some form of social or ritual significance over a long stretch of time, though the precise relationship between these elements remains unclear.

The enclosure sits in ordinary farmland, and the surviving bank is largely swallowed by overgrowth and clearance stone. What is most visible now is probably what appears in old maps and photographs rather than what can be traced on the ground.

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Pete F
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