Enclosure, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Baile Uí Shé, Co. Kerry

On the western slopes of Ballysitteragh mountain on the Dingle Peninsula, the Ordnance Survey maps mark a circular enclosure that no longer quite exists.

What remains on the ground is a rough scatter of stones, spread across a diameter of about 16.4 metres, the original wall reduced to a low, irregular ring that only hints at the form it once held. Even less survives of the clochaun, a small dry-stone hut or cell, which the older Ordnance Survey Memoirs recorded on the eastern side of the enclosure with its wall still standing roughly two feet, or 0.6 metres, high. That feature has since disappeared entirely from view.

The site sits approximately 125 metres northwest of the Ballyheabought river, a quietly specific detail that places it firmly within a landscape long known for early medieval and prehistoric remains. The Dingle Peninsula has an unusually dense concentration of such enclosures, many of them associated with early Christian or pre-Christian settlement, though this particular example has lost too much of its fabric to say much with confidence about its original purpose or date. It was catalogued by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the peninsula, a survey that brought together decades of fieldwork across one of Ireland's most archaeologically layered regions. By the time that record was compiled, the enclosure was already in the state of dispersal it remains in today, a site that the maps still faithfully mark even as the stones themselves have settled into the hillside.

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