Enclosure, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope at Baurearagh in Kerry, a small D-shaped wall has been slowly disappearing into the bog for centuries.

It has not quite managed it yet. The collapsed drystone wall, measuring roughly 4.6 metres across its north-south axis and about half a metre high where it still stands, protrudes just above the surface of the surrounding blanket bog, its loose stones scattered across the exterior like something that was once carefully arranged and then very gradually let go. The straight southern side of the D runs just under five metres, giving the whole enclosure a flat-bottomed, purposeful shape that reads less like accident and more like design.

The enclosure sits on a terrace of the slope, sheltered to the north by a cliff, a placement that speaks to the practical logic of whoever built it. In the centre of the enclosed area there is a hut site, the small remains of a structure that would once have provided basic shelter, most likely for a person tending animals on the high ground during the summer grazing season, a practice known in Ireland as booleying. Drystone construction, walls built without mortar by carefully fitting stone against stone, was the standard building method for this kind of upland enclosure, and its survival here, however fragmentary, is partly owed to the preserving properties of the surrounding peat. Blanket bog, which covers much of this part of Kerry, accumulates slowly over millennia and tends to hold whatever it enfolds, which is why the wall, though collapsed, remains visible at all.

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Pete F
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