Enclosure, Banna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
At Banna in north County Kerry, there is an archaeological site that has effectively ceased to exist in any visible form, yet continues to be recorded and mapped.
The enclosure in question, an area of enclosed land whose origins almost certainly predate the nineteenth century, has left no trace on the ground that can be seen today. What survives instead is a paper outline, a ghost preserved across two editions of the Ordnance Survey.
The 1842 Ordnance Survey map shows a fieldbank running immediately south of the site in an east-west direction, a modest but legible feature of the landscape. By the time the revised edition was published in 1897, that fieldbank was still in place, though the western sector had acquired a track running in a north-west to south-east direction, suggesting some degree of continued use or reorganisation of the land around the old enclosure. At some point between then and now, whatever remained above ground was lost entirely, absorbed into the surrounding fields or simply worn away. The site was documented by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which catalogued the area's older features before modern change could erase them further.
