Enclosure, Ballycarty, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballycarty, Co. Kerry

A low, almost imperceptible bank curving through the limestone of a Kerry spur is not the sort of thing that draws the eye, yet the two conjoined subcircular enclosures at Ballycarty sit at the outer edge of one of the more quietly remarkable archaeological complexes in the county.

The southerly of the pair is the less clearly defined, its bank averaging just 3.5 metres wide and barely raised above the surrounding ground, measuring roughly 10 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west on the outside. What makes the location register is not the enclosures themselves in isolation but where they sit and what surrounds them.

The spur on which they stand is a Carboniferous limestone reef, Waulsortian in type, a formation laid down in warm shallow seas and now rising as one of the highest points on the floor of a broad flat valley between the Stacks Mountains to the north-north-east and the Slieve Mish range to the south-south-west. When trial excavations were carried out here in 1999 ahead of construction of the N22 link road between Ballycarty Cross and the Killarney road, Kerry County Archaeologist Michael Connolly recorded the spur as carrying at least six distinct archaeological elements across approximately 200 metres: ramparts, a causeway, smaller enclosures, a hilltop enclosure possibly functioning as a henge, quarry ditches, and cairns. The two conjoined enclosures lie directly outside the eastern end of the causeway, positioned at the point where the spur meets the surrounding terrain. Early maps show the low-lying land around the reef as marshy, which would have made the spur read almost as a promontory in wetter periods, accessible by dry ground only from the east. From this position, the site commands views of the most passable routes through the flanking mountains and of two fording-points on the River Lee, which rises in the Stacks Mountains before bending sharply westward toward the sea at Blennerville. The limestone itself, with its minimal soil cover, preserves a notable density of fossil material, an incidental record of a much older world beneath the archaeological one.

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