Earthwork, Aghacurreen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Aghacurreen, Co. Kerry

In a level, low-lying field of improved pasture in Aghacurreen, County Kerry, something large and curved lies just out of reach of ordinary observation.

Stand in the field itself and you will see nothing of archaeological note, only grass and, towards the western edge, a dense growth of tall rushes. The earthwork is effectively invisible at ground level, its banks reduced to the point where they leave no surface trace a walker would recognise.

What gives the site away is aerial photography. Images captured by Ordnance Survey Ireland in 2010 and by Bing in 2015 both reveal a large curvilinear feature in the shape of a C, lying to the west of the recorded location. The shape is consistent with the kind of large C-shaped bank that field surveyors have occasionally encountered across Ireland, possibly the remnant of an enclosure whose function and date remain unclear here. Unusually, nothing at this location was flagged on the historic Ordnance Survey maps, meaning the feature either escaped nineteenth-century cartographers entirely or had already been reduced beyond recognition by then. That absence from the historic record, combined with its visibility only from the air, places it in a quiet category of sites known almost entirely through modern remote sensing rather than through any tradition of local recognition or formal excavation.

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Pete F
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