Enclosure, Annagh More, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Annagh More, Co. Kerry

On a south-west-facing slope above the valley of the Flesk River in County Kerry, a small irregular enclosure sits in rough hill pasture, its drystone walls partly collapsed and largely grassed over.

It measures roughly eleven metres east to west and eight and a half metres north to south, which makes it modest even by the standards of ancient field enclosures, the generic term for any bounded area defined by a wall or earthwork, used across millennia for purposes ranging from livestock management to more ceremonial functions. What gives this particular example a quietly practical character is a detail in its construction: the western portion of the interior has been built up by about forty centimetres to create a level surface, compensating for the natural fall of the hillside beneath it.

The walls tell a layered story. The western side and the curving north-west-to-east wall are now grassed over, their stonework subsumed into the slope. The southern boundary is more ambiguous: it is formed by a field wall whose lower courses appear to be genuinely old, relict material, while the upper section looks to be of more recent construction, suggesting that later agricultural activity reused and extended whatever was already there. Drystone construction, which relies on carefully fitted unmortered stone rather than any binding material, is extraordinarily durable when left undisturbed, and the survival of even a partial wall to a maximum height of around seventy centimetres is enough to read the enclosure's outline clearly. A second enclosure lies roughly twenty-five metres to the north-west, and a relict field wall runs approximately seventy metres to the north-east, hinting that this was once part of a broader organised landscape on the hillside, now largely returned to rough grazing.

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