Enclosure, Ceathrú An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ceathrú An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

On the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, a small circular enclosure sits on a gentle south-westerly facing slope, looking out towards Dunmore Head and the Blasket Islands.

What makes it quietly peculiar is not its size, which is modest at six metres in internal diameter, but the fact that its most likely entrance has been deliberately blocked. A standing stone, just over a metre tall and wider than it is high, sits in what appears to be a gap on the south-eastern side, as though the enclosure was sealed rather than simply abandoned.

The enclosing bank is built of stone and earth, around two and a half metres wide but barely thirty centimetres high at its tallest, giving it a low, compressed profile against the hillside. Enclosures of this general type are common across the Irish landscape and served a variety of purposes, from livestock management to ritual use, though the function of this particular example is not recorded. The standing stone blocking the entrance is harder to explain in purely practical terms. Whether it was placed there as part of the enclosure's original design or introduced later is unknown. The site was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough regional study that documented a landscape unusually dense with early remains. Ceathrú An Fheirtéaraigh, anglicised as Ferriter's Quarter, takes its name from the Ferriter family, a prominent Gaelic-Norman dynasty associated with this part of west Kerry for several centuries.

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