Enclosure, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, An Choill Mhór, Co. Kerry

Beneath the blanket bog of An Choill Mhór on the Dingle Peninsula, most of a circular stone enclosure is still waiting.

Turf-cutting has stripped back enough peat to expose the outer face of the structure, but the interior remains buried under roughly three-quarters of a metre of bog, and a further shallow layer of uncut peat still hides the precise level at which the wall meets the original ground surface. What has been measured is already striking: an external diameter of 14.5 metres and, according to probing with bamboo rods, a wall thickness of around 2.4 metres, though some of that bulk likely reflects collapse rather than original construction. The outer face is built from large boulders, noticeably different in scale from the smaller stones used in the nearby field walls, suggesting a structure that was deliberately monumental, or at least substantially built.

The enclosure is the kind of circular stone structure, often referred to simply as a cashel or stone ringfort, that served as a defended farmstead or settlement enclosure in early medieval Ireland, though without excavation the precise date and function here remain open questions. What the probing has also revealed is an absence of walling in the east-north-east sector of the circuit, which is likely the location of the original entrance. Three field walls radiate outward from the enclosure in a pre-bog pattern, hinting at a small agricultural landscape that was already ancient when the peat began to form over it. The relationship between those walls and the enclosure itself is obscured by collapse, so whether they were contemporary or sequential remains unclear. The survey that first recorded these details, carried out by J. Cuppage for the Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, documented the site at a moment when turf-cutting had only partially revealed it, and much of the structure's story remains literally underground.

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