Building, Dromagorteen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Utility Structures
Some sites are remembered precisely because there is nothing left to see.
On a south-west-facing slope in the valley of the Sheen River, within what is now Bonane Heritage Park, there exists a recorded archaeological site that consists entirely of an absence. No walls, no foundations, no earthworks; just a level break in the hillside where something once stood.
In the 1930s, a Captain D.B. O'Connell recorded an ancient building at this location for the Kerry Archaeological Survey. That note is essentially all that survives. Whether the structure was medieval, earlier, or later, what it was used for, and when it disappeared, are questions the record cannot answer. The site sits in a landscape that contains other, more legible antiquities, which makes the silence around this one all the more pointed. It was noticed, written down, and then, somewhere between that observation and the present day, whatever remained vanished entirely.