Enclosure, Teeromoyle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small circular structure sits in quiet obscurity at Teeromoyle, its form legible only to those who know what to look for.
What survives is a hut built with a double wall of upright slabs, the gap between them packed with rubble, a construction method that gave these small dry-stone shelters their considerable solidity. The eastern side retains this double-wall arrangement, while the western side is defined by just three standing uprights. The whole thing measures roughly 4.2 metres across and survives to a height of only 0.4 metres, with walls about 1.8 metres thick at their broadest point.
Abutting the hut to the northwest is a second, less well-preserved feature: a slab-built enclosure roughly 6.8 metres in diameter, some of its stones still upright, others long since collapsed. The relationship between the two structures is not entirely clear, but the conjunction of a small hut and an adjoining enclosure is a pattern recognised elsewhere on the Iveragh Peninsula, where such groupings are often associated with early medieval or prehistoric settlement and stock management. The Iveragh Peninsula as a whole is exceptionally dense with early monuments of this kind, and the survey compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, documented hundreds of comparable sites across the area.
The modest dimensions and low survival height make this the kind of site that rewards patience and a reasonable eye for landscape reading. The slabs that remain upright offer a sense of the original construction logic, even where the enclosure has lost much of its coherence to time and collapse.