Enclosure, Lerrig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lerrig, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Lerrig in north County Kerry, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists in any visible sense, yet was considered significant enough to be mapped twice by the Ordnance Survey and photographed from the air by the Geological Survey of Ireland.

It is, in the most literal way, a place defined entirely by its absence.

The site was recorded on the OS maps of 1842 and 1897 as a circular enclosure, a category of monument extremely common in Ireland. These enclosures, sometimes called ringforts or raths, were typically earthen or stone-built enclosures used as farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly 500 to 1200 AD, though some are older. By the time aerial photography captured the Lerrig landscape in 1977, the enclosure had already been levelled, its banks and ditches ploughed or cleared away, but the soil disturbance left by centuries of occupation remained legible from above as a cropmark or soil discolouration. That faint ghostly impression recorded in the Geological Survey's photographs is now the only direct visual evidence the enclosure ever existed. No surface trace remains today.

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