Enclosure, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Gearhanagoul, Co. Kerry

What makes this small enclosure in the Gearhanagoul area of south-west Kerry particularly interesting is not the structure itself but the company it keeps.

Sitting on a south-facing slope above the valley of the Coomeelan stream, in rough hill pasture that has changed little in centuries, this modest D-shaped enclosure forms just one piece of a much denser archaeological picture. Within a radius of roughly thirty metres, there are two further enclosures and a fulacht fia, the last being an ancient cooking site typically identified by a mound of fire-cracked stone beside a water source or pit. About eleven metres to the east lies what may be a boulder-burial, a prehistoric monument type in which a large capstone rests directly on the ground or on small supports without the earthen covering of a conventional burial mound. The cluster suggests that this particular slope was a place of repeated, deliberate human activity across a long span of time.

The enclosure itself is small, measuring 8.4 metres on its north-east to south-west axis, with a curving wall of earth and stone that has partially collapsed to a height of around 0.2 metres and a thickness of roughly a metre. Its north-east side, spanning 12.5 metres, is actually shared with a larger adjoining enclosure whose bank does double duty as a boundary for both. A narrow entrance, just a metre wide, faces north-west. The D-shape, created where the smaller enclosure butts up against the arc of its neighbour, is a fairly common arrangement in early medieval Irish settlement archaeology, where subsidiary enclosures were often appended to a main rath or ringfort for keeping animals or storing goods. Whether that is the function here, the notes do not confirm, but the form is suggestive.

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Pete F
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