Enclosure, Shrone More, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Shrone More, Co. Kerry

On the north-facing slopes of Knocknabro in County Kerry, there is a structure that exists more convincingly on paper than it does on the ground.

A rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly seven metres from northwest to southeast and three metres from northeast to southwest, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1894 to 1895. Today, standing in the rough, heavily overgrown hill pasture where it should be, you would see nothing. The land has simply closed over it.

That a feature so modest in scale was captured by the OS surveyors at all says something about the thoroughness of that extraordinary nineteenth-century mapping project, which documented field boundaries, ruins, and earthworks across Ireland with a consistency that has since made those old sheets an invaluable baseline for archaeologists. What the enclosure at Shrone More actually was, whether a small settlement feature, a stock enclosure, or something earlier, is not recorded. Its precise origins remain unresolved. What survives is essentially a cartographic ghost: a shape on an 1894 map, on a hillside that has since grown over whatever trace once made it legible to those surveyors.

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Pete F
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