Enclosure, Boolasallagh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Boolasallagh, Co. Kerry

In a pasture field at Boolasallagh in County Kerry, a prehistoric enclosure survives in a condition so reduced that walking across it, you would likely notice nothing at all.

On the ground, the monument has been absorbed entirely into the working landscape, its interior grazed flat and a later field boundary cutting straight through the south-eastern sector. What remains is essentially a memory of an outline, and even that outline is only fully legible from the air.

The enclosure is sub-circular in plan, measuring roughly 36 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west. It was defined by a bank of earth and stone, the type of boundary feature common to enclosed settlements and ceremonial sites across prehistoric and early medieval Ireland. A fosse, the external ditch that would originally have fronted the bank, survives to the south-west and curves around to the north-north-east, reaching nearly six metres in total width at its broadest point, though it is now only about 40 centimetres deep. The bank itself, where it survives best between the south-west and west-north-west, stands barely 60 centimetres above the interior surface. Much of the remainder has been levelled entirely. The relationship between the bank and the fosse suggests a degree of deliberate enclosure, with the dug material likely piled inward to raise the bank, a standard arrangement for ringforts and similar enclosures that once punctuated the Irish countryside in their thousands. Aerial photography captured in 2010 by Ordnance Survey Ireland reveals the best-preserved arc of the bank, where the slight rise in the ground still reads clearly against the surrounding field.

For anyone visiting, the honest expectation is that the site will be unremarkable to the naked eye in the pasture field itself. The value here is largely one of knowing what is underfoot, and appreciating how quietly a substantial prehistoric earthwork can dissolve into an ordinary agricultural field over centuries of use.

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Pete F
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