Enclosure, An Luachair, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, An Luachair, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of the central mountain ridge above the Emlagh river valley, at a place called An Luachair in County Kerry, there is an enclosure that has been, quite literally, disappearing into the ground.

What was once a visible earthwork has been reduced by ploughing to little more than a ghostly outline, detectable only by a band of soil with a noticeably higher stone content than the surrounding field. That strip of stony earth is essentially all that remains of the bank, a quiet remnant of something that once marked out a defined and deliberate space in this rough, boggy pastureland on the Dingle Peninsula.

The site is a univallate enclosure, meaning it was defined by a single bank and, on its eastern side at least, a fosse, the term for a ditch dug as part of a defensive or boundary earthwork. Its form, semi-circular and open to the south-east, is a shape found across early medieval Ireland, often associated with a ringfort or enclosed farmstead, though the precise function of this particular site is not recorded. The detail about its changing appearance across Ordnance Survey editions is telling: the first edition map shows it simply as an irregularly-shaped field, while the second captures it as a recognisable enclosure with a fosse to the east. That shift between editions suggests either that surveying improved, or that the earthwork was more legible at one point than another. J. Cuppage documented the site in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, by which time ploughing had already begun to erode whatever structural clarity remained.

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