Enclosure, Garrane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the western flank of a spur running off Caunoge mountain in south Kerry, a small stone enclosure sits above the upper Ferta river valley without so much as a mark on the Ordnance Survey map.
That absence is itself telling. Whatever once stood here was significant enough to require careful construction, including an artificially raised interior to level out the slope of the hillside, yet it has slipped entirely out of the cartographic record and, it would seem, out of common knowledge.
What survives is fragmentary but legible to a careful eye. The eastern arc of the enclosure wall is the only section still standing to any meaningful extent, averaging just over a metre in width and 0.35 metres in height internally, with faint traces of coursed stonework still visible in places. The roughly circular outline, around 13.3 metres in diameter, suggests something that was once a substantial homestead or small farmstead enclosure of the kind built across early medieval Ireland. In the southeastern quadrant, the foundations of a circular hut sit against the inner face of the enclosure wall, with an average foundation width of 2.6 metres. Immediately to the north of the hut lies the opening to a souterrain, a stone-built underground passage typically associated with early medieval settlement sites and thought to have served for storage or as a place of refuge. The eastern edge of that opening is now marked by a scatter of collapsed walling, and the passage itself, which appears to run east to west, cannot be entered.
The combination of enclosure, hut, and souterrain points to a settlement of some antiquity, most likely early medieval in character, though no excavation has been recorded and the dating rests on the form of the remains rather than any documentary or material evidence. The site was documented as part of the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which remains the principal source for understanding the density and variety of archaeological remains across this mountainous corner of Kerry.