Enclosure, Fermoyle, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Fermoyle, Co. Kerry

At Fermoyle in south Kerry, a roughly circular stone enclosure sits quietly at the northern end of a larger complex of features, most of its original fabric still legible despite centuries of interference.

Later field walls have crept across it, particularly on its western side, and a modern enclosure presses against its interior at the south-east. Yet enough survives to give a clear sense of what was once here: a carefully constructed ring, somewhere between twelve and twelve metres across, built with a degree of deliberate craft that separates it from a simple field boundary.

The wall itself, now standing no higher than half a metre in places and averaging about one and a half metres in width, is built around a rubble core. Both its inner and outer faces are lined with large flat slabs, and at intervals along each face, boulder-like stones set upright on their edges create a kind of intermittent framing. This technique, using orthostats or edge-set stones alongside coursed walling, is a feature found across early Irish enclosures, often associated with settlement or ritual use. The entrance gap, at one point one metres wide, is defined on its northern side by a single upright slab standing 1.2 metres tall, with two smaller uprights forming the opposite jamb. Stone enclosures of this kind on the Iveragh Peninsula, the broad southwestern finger of land that carries the Ring of Kerry, were documented in detail by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 archaeological survey of the area published by Cork University Press, from which this description is drawn.

The enclosure sits within a wider complex of features at Fermoyle, so a visitor who locates it is likely to find other structural remains nearby. The entrance gap and its flanking uprights are the most legible elements and give the clearest indication of the original layout, even where later walling has blurred the outer circuit.

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