Enclosure, Derrynacaheragh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derrynacaheragh, Co. Kerry

On a hillside in Derrynacaheragh, overlooking the valley of the Feabunaun stream, there is a small rectangular enclosure that raises a question it does not easily answer.

Built into the base of its north-west wall is a lintelled opening, just a metre wide and sixty-five centimetres high, sitting flush with the ground. It is too low and too deliberately constructed to be incidental, yet its purpose remains unrecorded. The structure as a whole measures roughly five and a half metres by five metres, modest enough to cross in a few strides, and it sits in rough hill pasture on an east-facing slope, the kind of ground that was never prime farmland but was never entirely abandoned either.

The enclosure is defined on three sides, the south-west, north-west, and north-east, by a grass-covered earthen bank that stands about 1.4 metres high and nearly a metre thick. That bank is faced on its inner surface with drystone walling, a construction technique that gives a soft exterior profile while reinforcing the interior face against collapse or erosion. The south-east side takes a different approach entirely: here, a drystone wall serves double duty, forming both the boundary of this enclosure and the wall of an adjoining hut site immediately beside it. The entrance, 1.2 metres wide, is placed at the north corner. Whether the enclosure and the hut were built together as a single working complex, or accumulated separately over time, the shared wall suggests at minimum that whoever used one was aware of the other. The lintelled opening at the base of the north-west wall adds a further layer of interest; low-set openings of this kind occasionally served as drains, as small animal passages, or as access points to a souterrain, an underground passage or storage chamber, though no such chamber is recorded here.

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Pete F
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