Enclosure, Glanmore, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glanmore, Co. Kerry

On a south-east-facing slope above the Glanmore River valley, someone long ago built only half a wall.

The other half was already there, supplied by nature: a straight vertical face of outcropping rock, roughly 8.9 metres long, forms the entire north-west side of this small enclosure. Whoever constructed it recognised that the landscape had done half the work, and so they added only what was necessary, a crudely built, curving drystone wall completing a D-shape across the remaining arc. The result is compact, just 4.5 metres across its longest axis, and sits in rough pasture with an uneven interior that slopes away to the south.

Enclosures of this kind, small stone-bounded spaces whose purpose is no longer legible, appear across Kerry in considerable numbers. They may have served as animal pens, as boundaries around a small cultivated plot, or as something more ceremonial, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What makes this one quietly interesting is the economy of its construction. The builder incorporated not only the rock face as a structural wall but also outcropping stone at the south-east and a large boulder at the east into the fabric of the curving section, so that the finished wall, though only about 0.45 metres thick and surviving to roughly 0.75 metres in height at its eastern end, feels almost grown from the hillside rather than placed upon it. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and instead relies on careful stacking and the weight of the stones themselves, demands a good eye for the material at hand, and whoever built this had clearly looked hard at what the slope already offered.

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