Enclosure, Aghacoora, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Aghacoora, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Aghacoora in north Kerry, there is a feature that exists more as a cartographic ghost than a physical one.

A small semi-circular enclosure, the kind of earthwork typically formed by a curved bank or ditch marking out a dwelling or enclosure of some antiquity, appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1916 but is entirely absent from the earlier OS mapping of 1841 to 1842. Nothing survives on the ground today. Whatever was once there, or was once believed to be there, has left no surface trace.

The gap between those two map surveys is curious. The enclosure's appearance on the 1916 map but not the 1841 one could mean a number of things: that it was recorded by a later surveyor who noticed something his predecessor missed, that a local informant passed on knowledge of a feature that had already largely disappeared, or that the identification was uncertain even at the time of mapping. The qualifier "possible enclosure" reflects that ambiguity honestly. What lends the site a little extra interest is a piece of local tradition linking this spot to an ancient routeway running to the north-west, a track or road of unspecified age that appears to have been remembered in the area even as the enclosure itself faded from view. Ancient roads and enclosures often appear together in the Irish landscape, the one serving the other, and the pairing here, however faint, gestures at a small, localised history that has otherwise gone entirely unrecorded.

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Pete F
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