Enclosure, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry

On a grass-covered limestone reef in Ballyseedy, County Kerry, there is an ancient enclosure that raises more questions than it answers.

The site occupies the top of the reef, commanding views in most directions, with the mountaintop cairns at Clahane visible through a gap in the mountains to the south. What makes it genuinely puzzling is that, despite the effort clearly invested in its construction, it is almost certainly not a place where anyone lived. The central enclosure is 37 metres in diameter, but its interior slopes so steeply, dropping roughly two metres from west to east, that daily life inside it would have been awkward at best. The western aspect is blocked entirely by the rise in ground level, and when standing at the centre, the view opens predominantly eastward. Someone built this deliberately, and oriented it carefully, but not, it seems, as a home.

The structure is more layered than it first appears. The circular central enclosure is surrounded by the remains of at least three concentric banks, none of which fully encircle it, curving in arcs from west through north and east. The innermost is constructed of mixed earth and stone; the outermost appears to be entirely earth. All three have been worn down considerably, partly through centuries of cattle grazing on the reef, which the surrounding farmland largely bypassed because the rock outcrop made it unprofitable to cultivate. Inside the central enclosure, pressed against its western interior wall, is a roughly circular area of stone collapse measuring about nine metres across, with a shallow central depression half a metre deep. Whether this represents the remains of a structure, a cairn, or something else is unclear, as grass now covers everything. A four-metre break in the bank at the north-west might once have been an entrance, though this cannot be confirmed. About forty metres to the north of the reef sits a large circular limestone cave or hollow, estimated at around twenty metres in depth, which floods with water seasonally. Its possible connection to the hilltop complex is unresolved, but the proximity feels unlikely to be coincidental.

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Pete F
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