Enclosure, Tobermaing, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
The place-name Tobermaing carries its own quiet clue.
"Tobar" is the Irish word for a well, and its appearance in this Kerry townland name suggests a landscape that was considered significant long before anyone thought to map it formally. Somewhere within that landscape sits a feature recorded only as an enclosure, one of thousands of such monuments scattered across Ireland, ranging from prehistoric farmsteads to early medieval ringforts, their exact character often knowable only through close survey work on the ground.
Enclosures of this kind were typically defined by an earthen bank, a fosse, a stone wall, or some combination of these, and they served any number of purposes across many centuries: domestic settlement, agricultural management, or the demarcation of land with ritual or ceremonial meaning. Kerry, with its dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric remains, has no shortage of such sites, many of them sitting in farmland or rough upland ground, their outlines softened by centuries of weather and use. Without more detailed survey information having been published for this particular example, the specifics of its form, its date, and its context within the surrounding townland remain open questions.