Enclosure, An Sliabh Glas, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In the marshy ground beside the Owennafeana river on the Dingle Peninsula, there is a small oval ring of drystone walling that nobody can quite categorise.
It measures roughly ten metres east to west and eight metres north to south internally, its rough-coursed wall rising to no more than three-quarters of a metre at its highest point. No entrance has been identified. For a structure so modest, it carries a quietly loaded question: what exactly was it for, and who built it?
The confusion over its identity has a paper trail. On the Ordnance Survey Fair Plan, the manuscript working copy made before the published maps were finalised, the site was marked as a "fort". That word carried real meaning in nineteenth-century surveying practice, typically indicating a ringfort, the circular or oval enclosures of drystone or earthen construction that served as farmsteads across Ireland from the early medieval period onward. Yet by the time the OS published its finished maps, the label had disappeared entirely, leaving the site unnamed and, in cartographic terms, unclassified. It sits about fifty metres from the northern bank of the Owennafeana river, in ground that is marshy enough to make the question of why anyone would build here at all a reasonable one to ask. The archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne area, published by J. Cuppage in 1986, recorded the structure but offered no firm interpretation.
The combination of waterlogged setting, vanished entrance, and a cartographic identity that was assigned and then quietly withdrawn gives the site an oddly provisional quality. It was considered significant enough to name, then not significant enough to keep named, and its true function remains open.