Enclosure, Meall Na Mbreac, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Meall Na Mbreac, Co. Kerry

On a boggy ridge at Meall na Mbreac in south-west Kerry, a circular enclosure sits in quiet defiance of the surrounding landscape, its drystone perimeter wall still protruding above the surface of the bog after who knows how many centuries.

The wall, built from smallish blocky stones and running to roughly sixty centimetres thick with a surviving height of up to eighty centimetres, traces the edge of a low mound and encloses an area of about forty-one metres north to south and thirty-seven metres east to west. It is the kind of structure that rewards a second look: not a ruin in the dramatic sense, but a system, a place where people organised space with some deliberateness.

The enclosure is not alone. Within its interior, two hut sites survive, one in the south-west quadrant and one against the western inner wall. A hut site, in archaeological terms, is the ground-level trace of a former dwelling or working structure, often no more than a spread of stone or a slight hollow, but enough to suggest habitation rather than mere enclosure of land. Attached to the outside of the western wall is a subrectangular annexe measuring roughly twenty-four by sixteen metres, its own stone wall still standing to about fifty-five centimetres. A relict field boundary, the ghostly line of an old agricultural division, extends away to the south-east. When surveyors visited in the 1990s they recorded a second annexe at the northern side and another field boundary running northward toward the Inny River valley below. Both of those features have since disappeared below ground level, absorbed back into the bog, which is a reminder of how much such landscapes can change within a single generation of observation.

The site sits at the western end of an east-west ridge, positioned to overlook the Inny River valley to the north. The bog that surrounds it is both the reason so much has survived and the reason some of it has vanished; peat is an inconsistent archivist. Visitors approaching across boggy pasture should expect uneven ground and the usual Kerry unpredictability of weather. The wall stones are modest and easy to miss at first glance, but the overall shape of the enclosure becomes clearer once you are standing inside it and can read the slight rise of the mound beneath your feet.

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Pete F
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