Enclosure, Barrakilla, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the gently sloping ground just north of Chute Hall in County Kerry, a large prehistoric enclosure once curved across the landscape in a broad sub-oval arc.
Today, almost nothing of it can be seen from the ground. The field boundaries that for centuries quietly respected its outline have been cleared away, the land folded into a single large cultivated field, and the earthworks reduced to faint undulations in the soil. What was once a substantial monument, roughly 180 metres by 160 metres in extent, with a bank estimated at somewhere between nine and twelve metres wide, survives now only as a slight roughness in the earth along the line where that bank once ran.
The enclosure was recorded on both the first and second edition Ordnance Survey maps as a large curving semi-circular field boundary, with what appeared to be the remains of a second bank to the south-west. The surrounding field system shown on those maps was notably well-behaved around it, with boundaries arranged in a way that suggests local farmers, over many generations, were working around something they recognised as fixed and immovable. The eastern side of the enclosure was never clearly mapped, but the overall form, a sub-oval shape with possible double banking, draws comparison with a similar site at Glanbane elsewhere in Kerry. The reclamation works that erased the visible remains on the ground were carried out in the mid-1980s, when field amalgamation schemes reshaped considerable stretches of the Irish countryside. The enclosure's place within the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley near Tralee was examined by Michael Connolly in his 2008 doctoral thesis at University College Cork, which set it within a broader landscape of prehistoric activity in the region.
Aerial photography has proved more revealing than a ground visit. The outline of the enclosure, largely invisible underfoot, shows clearly from above, including a possible continuation of the site line to the south-east that ground inspection alone could not confirm. For anyone with an interest in how much can disappear within a single generation of land improvement, this site is an instructive case: a monument large enough to have organised the local field pattern for centuries, reduced to a faint soil signature detectable mainly from the air.