Enclosure, Baile An Lochaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, an old field wall connects three structures in a neat northwest to southeast line, a quiet alignment that suggests deliberate organisation on a landscape that has long since moved on from whoever arranged it.
These are not dramatic ruins; they are the kind of low, functional remains that most walkers pass without registering, yet that alignment, preserved in the townland of Baile An Lochaigh, hints at a working arrangement that once made sense to somebody.
The most closely documented of the three is a circular drystone structure, built without mortar in the traditional manner, sitting within a small irregularly-shaped enclosure measuring just four metres by four metres. The structure itself is 2.8 metres in diameter, stands 1.5 metres high, and has walls 1.3 metres thick, proportions that suggest solidity rather than ambition. Within the same enclosure there are traces of what may have been a sheep-shelter, which gives a tentative but plausible reading of the whole arrangement: a working pastoral complex, modest in scale, whose components were linked by that old field wall into something more coherent than the individual parts now suggest. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a detailed regional study that documented the extraordinary density of field monuments across this part of west Kerry.