Enclosure, Ballynageragh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynageragh, Co. Kerry

At Ballynageragh in north County Kerry, a circular enclosure sits so close to the level of the surrounding land that most people would walk straight across it without noticing anything unusual.

What was once a defined, mapped feature is now little more than a slight swell in the ground, rising only around four metres above the fields nearby, with an internal diameter of roughly twenty metres east to west.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape, typically interpreted as enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites dating from the early medieval period, though some examples are older. They were usually defined by a raised bank and sometimes a ditch, enclosing a domestic area where a family or small community would have lived and kept livestock. The Ballynageragh example was clearly visible enough in the mid-nineteenth century to be recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842, and it appears again, if less distinctly, on the revised maps of 1914 to 1915. That gradual fading from the cartographic record reflects what was likely happening on the ground over the same period, as agricultural activity slowly reduced the earthwork's profile. By the time of more recent survey work, documented in C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey published in 1995, it had been much levelled and was barely perceptible.

There is something quietly compelling about a site whose main story is one of near-disappearance. The enclosure has not been excavated, so what lies beneath that low rise, and who once lived within its boundaries, remains an open question.

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Pete F
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