House - indeterminate date, Annagap, Co. Kerry

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House

House – indeterminate date, Annagap, Co. Kerry

On a north-east facing slope just outside Anascaul in County Kerry, a large subrectangular enclosure called Lisnakilla, or Lios na Cille in Irish, contains the reduced remains of several rectangular structures whose precise age and purpose no one can say with confidence.

That uncertainty is part of what makes the place quietly compelling. The walls have sunk to low stony banks, the enclosure is divided by internal walls, and the whole interior is threaded with east-west cultivation ridges, meaning the site carries the overlapping traces of at least two distinct phases of human activity, possibly more.

The enclosure sits less than a kilometre north of Anascaul, roughly two hundred metres west of the Owenascaul river. At least four rectangular structures occupy the northern half of the enclosure; two of them are built against the southern face of the northern dividing wall, another abuts the middle dividing wall from the north, and a fourth sits in the north-east corner. Whether these structures were houses, agricultural buildings, or something else is not settled. The cultivation ridges that fill the remaining interior space may or may not be contemporary with the internal walls and structures, and it is possible the whole arrangement belongs to a later period of agricultural use rather than to any earlier, more dramatic function. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement, was reportedly discovered years ago in the south-west sector of the enclosure, though no surface trace of it remains visible today. The site was surveyed and described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which remains the principal published account of the complex.

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