Enclosure, Awnaskirtaun, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a north-west-facing slope above the Awnaskirtaun River in County Kerry, a ring of collapsed stone sits quietly in rough hill pasture, easy to walk past and easier still to misread as a natural scatter of rock.
It is, in fact, a circular enclosure, roughly eight metres across, the kind of modest but deliberate structure that appears throughout the Irish uplands and often resists confident interpretation.
Small stone enclosures of this type are found across Kerry and the wider south-west, and their purposes varied considerably. Some served as animal pens or seasonal shelters associated with transhumance, the old practice of moving livestock to higher grazing land in summer. Others were burial enclosures, garden plots, or the footprints of long-vanished buildings. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say which category applies, and this example on the slopes of Knocknabro, beside the river that gives the townland its name, is no exception. What survives is the collapsed perimeter wall, reduced now to a low spread of stone that traces the original circuit without rising to any meaningful height.