Enclosure, An Fearann, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, An Fearann, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites reward the visitor with walls, earthworks, or at least a suggestive hollow in the ground.

The enclosure that once stood at An Fearann, close to the eastern shore of Dingle Harbour in County Kerry, offers none of these things. What the Ordnance Survey maps record at this location, a circular univallate enclosure, meaning a single-ditched or single-banked ringfort of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, has left no visible trace whatsoever. In its place sits a playing field.

The enclosure was documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which catalogued the remarkable density of prehistoric and early medieval remains across the Corca Dhuibhne region. At the time of that survey, the site's position roughly 250 metres from the eastern edge of Dingle Harbour could still be fixed on the map, even if little or nothing remained above ground. Since then, the land has been converted for recreational use, completing the erasure of whatever physical form the enclosure once held. It joins a quiet category of Irish archaeological sites that exist now only as map notations and footnotes, places whose significance is attested but whose substance has been absorbed entirely by later use of the land.

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