Enclosure, Keelties, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Keelties, Co. Kerry

Beneath a northwest-facing pasture in Keelties, County Kerry, lies a circular enclosure that has effectively vanished from the surface.

No earthwork rises above the grass, no ring of stones marks the perimeter; the site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic fact, preserved in ink rather than in the landscape itself.

The enclosure, roughly fifteen metres in diameter, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, placed in the southwest corner of a small trapezoidal field. Circular enclosures of this kind, sometimes called ring forts or raths, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads. Whether this particular example once carried a raised earthen bank, or whether it was always a more modest feature, cannot be said from what survives. What the 1846 mapping tells us is that it was at least recognisable to the surveyors of that period, even if the ground has since levelled or the defining features have been lost to agriculture and time.

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Pete F
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