Enclosure, Baile Na Bhflann, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a sloping pasture field above St. Finan's Bay in south Kerry, there is nothing to see.
That is, in a sense, the point. A circular enclosure once stood here, recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, but no surface trace of it survives today. The field has been given over to grazing, and whatever earthwork or boundary once defined this site has been absorbed entirely into the landscape.
The enclosure lay approximately 80 metres south-west of the Templecashel oratory, a small early medieval stone church that still stands in the area. Circular enclosures of this kind, sometimes called raths or ring-forts depending on their construction, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads for a single family or household. Their proximity to ecclesiastical sites like oratories is not unusual; early Christian communities in Ireland often developed alongside, or in close relationship with, existing secular settlements. The fact that both features were mapped together on the first Ordnance Survey, produced in the nineteenth century, suggests the enclosure was at least partially visible at that time, even if its origins stretch back considerably further. Since then, agricultural activity and the passage of time have done the rest.