Enclosure, Ballybroman, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballybroman, Co. Kerry

In the north-west corner of a pastoral field at Ballybroman in County Kerry, there is, by all cartographic evidence, an ancient circular enclosure.

The difficulty is that there is nothing left to see. Whatever once defined this feature, whether a raised earthen bank, a stone wall, or some combination of both, has been entirely levelled, leaving no surface trace whatsoever. It exists now only as a mark on paper, a circle drawn and redrawn by Ordnance Survey cartographers across two separate mapping campaigns, and then, at some point between the surveyors and the present, quietly erased from the land itself.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common across the Irish landscape and are generally associated with the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, though many have prehistoric origins. They typically served as enclosed farmsteads, known in Irish archaeology as raths or ringforts, with an earthen bank and external ditch defining a domestic space for a family and their livestock. The Ballybroman example appeared on the Ordnance Survey's first large-scale mapping of Ireland, carried out in 1841 to 1842, and was still recorded on the revised edition of 1898, which suggests it retained enough physical presence to be worth marking at the end of the nineteenth century. At some point in the decades that followed, agricultural improvement or land clearance removed whatever remained.

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Pete F
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