Enclosure, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyseedy, Co. Kerry

An enclosure nearly 200 metres across is not easily overlooked, yet the one at Ballyseedy, outside Tralee, managed to disappear almost entirely within a few decades.

The site was first identified not by anyone walking the land but through colour aerial photography, the kind of bird's-eye perspective that reveals cropmarks and earthworks invisible at ground level. What it showed was a large roughly circular enclosure, 198 metres in diameter on its north-south axis, sitting on a naturally raised, platform-like area of ground. The enclosing bank was modest rather than imposing, averaging around 1.8 metres wide and only 0.3 metres high, built from stone and earth and threading between outcrops of bedrock that punctuated the perimeter at intervals, incorporating them as structural elements rather than working around them.

When fieldwork was carried out in 1997, stretches of the bank were still traceable to the north, west, and intermittently to the south. To the east, however, a field wall had already cut across the line of the enclosure, and the ground beyond it had been cleared of any surface trace through land improvement. That process of gradual erasure has continued steadily since. The bedrock outcrops, which would have anchored the bank and likely guided its original course, remain as fixed points, but between them the earthwork has been reduced to short disconnected fragments. The scale of the enclosure, comparable to the larger class of early medieval ringfort or enclosure type known in Ireland, suggests a site of some significance, though without excavation its date and function remain open questions.

Today, very little survives above ground, and what does is subtle enough that it would be easy to walk across the site without registering it. The remaining stretches of bank and the bedrock outcrops are the only physical traces of something that once defined nearly two hectares of raised ground.

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