Enclosure, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In the pasture above the Drombohilly River valley, there is, or possibly was, a slight oval swelling in the ground.
Measuring roughly twenty metres along its longer axis and fifteen across, it was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1895 to 1897 as a raised area marked with hachures, the fine radiating lines cartographers once used to indicate relief and earthworks. Today, nothing of it is visible at ground level.
That gap between what a Victorian surveyor could see and what a modern visitor cannot is the quiet puzzle at the centre of this site. The enclosure, if that is what it is, sits on undulating ground and butts up against a linear field boundary to the north-east. Enclosures of this kind, broadly speaking, are defined areas bounded by an earthen bank or wall, and they appear across Ireland in a range of contexts, from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial or funerary sites. Whether this particular feature belonged to any such tradition remains unresolved. The classification is provisional, the phrase "possible enclosure" doing the careful work of acknowledging that the cartographic evidence and the physical reality no longer quite agree.
What survives, in effect, is a ghost on a nineteenth-century map. The field has continued to be grazed, the ground has continued to settle, and whatever slight rise once caught the eye of an OS surveyor has been smoothed into the general contour of the hillside. The site is not so much lost as absorbed.