Enclosure, Manor, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the edge of Tralee, rising fifty feet above the surrounding lowlands on a limestone reef with sheer drops on most sides, there is an enclosure that does not officially exist.
At the time of its survey in the mid-1990s, it had not been entered into the Sites and Monuments Record for County Kerry, making it something of an archaeological anomaly: a substantial, clearly engineered prehistoric or early historic site sitting unregistered above one of the most surveyed valleys in Munster.
The reef itself, in the townland of Manor West, is a striking piece of natural topography that whoever built here clearly chose with purpose. It commands views across the Tralee area and dominates the Lee Valley in all directions, the kind of elevated, naturally defended position that attracted settlement and enclosure across Ireland for millennia. The surviving remains take the form of an intermittent stone and earth bank, roughly circular in plan, enclosing an area approximately eighty metres in diameter. Where it survives best, the bank stands to around 0.8 metres in height and spreads to some ten metres at its base, suggesting a structure that was once considerably more impressive. Most notably, on the north-west side of the reef, the enclosure appears to have been bi-vallate, meaning it was originally defined by two concentric banks rather than one, a feature associated with sites of some significance or status. No ditch has been identified alongside either bank, which is unusual and may reflect the hard limestone substrate beneath. Quarrying has since cut into the reef on the north-west, and housing development has consumed the more accessible southern slopes, stripping surface material and breaking up the bedrock. What remains of the interior is now almost completely overgrown with dense whitethorn scrub, separated from the development below by a later east-west boundary wall.