Enclosure, Derrygarrane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derrygarrane, Co. Kerry

In the boggy pasture of Derrygarrane, on the north bank of a stream running between Lough Fadda and the Kealduff river, a low ring of stone sits entirely unacknowledged by Ordnance Survey mapping.

That absence is itself a small puzzle. The enclosure is not dramatic, not large, and not well preserved, but it represents the kind of quietly persistent human presence that the landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula has a habit of quietly absorbing.

The wall, now reduced to a single course, encloses a roughly oval area with a maximum internal diameter of around fifteen metres. It is built with some care: 1.5 metres wide, faced on both its inner and outer surfaces with large stone slabs, and flanked here and there by slabs set upright on edge. No entrance could be identified during survey, which may simply reflect the degree of collapse rather than any original design without a formal threshold. Inside the enclosure, a rough circular arrangement of slabs, measuring approximately 3.5 by 3.3 metres internally, is thought to represent the remains of a small hut, the kind of simple single-roomed structure that would have sheltered a person or livestock. Stone enclosures of this type are found across early medieval and later Irish landscapes and were used variously for habitation, seasonal farming, or the management of animals, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which function applied in any given case. This particular example was recorded and described as part of the archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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