Enclosure, Knockanruddig, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a boggy hilltop plateau in Knockanruddig, near Kilgarvan in County Kerry, a low oval ring of dry-stone walling sits half-swallowed by peat.
It measures roughly 15 metres by 8 metres, its long axis running north to south, and in places the wall has sunk so far into the ground that only a careful eye picks it out at all. Where it does break the surface, it stands about 0.3 metres high, built from single stones with others leaning against them at angles that echo construction methods seen at other pre-modern field boundaries across the same hillside. The whole thing is easy to walk past.
The enclosure came to light during pre-development survey work carried out by John Cronin and Associates ahead of the Grousemount wind farm project in the area, work conducted under archaeological licence on behalf of ESB Wind Development Ltd. It sits close to a long cut-away section of bog and shares its plateau with at least one other recorded feature nearby. The wall construction, roughly 0.35 metres wide and laid without mortar, is consistent with a simple animal pen, the kind of seasonal or ad hoc structure that farming communities built at height to manage livestock on upland grazing ground. Dry-stone enclosures of this type, where stones are stacked or leaned rather than bonded, were common across Irish uplands for centuries, though dating them precisely is rarely straightforward without excavation. The peat that now buries parts of this wall has, in a way, preserved it, holding the stones in rough position long after any other trace of the people who built it has disappeared.