Enclosure, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the western shore of Lough Currane in south Kerry, a low, broken ring of collapsed stonework sits quietly in level grazing land, its original purpose now largely a matter of inference.
The site was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map as a circular enclosure, a category that covers a wide range of early Irish structures, from ringforts used as defended farmsteads to enclosures associated with ecclesiastical or ritual activity. What survives today is considerably less legible than that early cartographic record suggests.
The enclosing wall has long since fallen, leaving a roughly one-metre-wide band of stone rubble with no surviving evidence of how it was originally faced or coursed. It still manages a height of around 0.9 metres on the interior side and 1.1 metres on the exterior, enclosing an area approximately 16.3 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west. Two entrance gaps, each around 2.75 metres wide, open to the north-west and north-east, an arrangement that may reflect practical concerns about prevailing wind or access routes, though no definitive interpretation is possible from what remains. Four field walls radiate outward from the enclosure itself, suggesting that whatever the site's original function, it was later integrated into a field system, its boundaries repurposed to organise the surrounding land. This kind of secondary use is common across Ireland, where prehistoric and early medieval enclosures were frequently absorbed into later agricultural landscapes, their original significance gradually eroded by the more immediate demands of farming.