Enclosure, Banna, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Banna, Co. Kerry

Near Banna in north County Kerry, a modest oval ring in the earth marks what was once a clearly defined enclosure, now so reduced by centuries of agricultural levelling that it barely registers as a feature of the landscape at all.

The earthen bank that once enclosed it measures somewhere between five and six metres wide, yet stands only half a metre above the surrounding ground, less a wall than a memory of one pressed flat into the soil.

The enclosure is oval in plan, stretching roughly 30.8 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, dimensions consistent with the kind of early enclosures found widely across Ireland, which typically served as farmsteads, ecclesiastical boundaries, or places of assembly, depending on their context. It was recorded on Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1897, meaning it was still a legible feature of the landscape well into the nineteenth century. At some point between those surveys and the present day, the process of field clearance and cultivation reduced it to its current near-invisible state. Without the cartographic record, it would be easy to walk across the site and notice nothing at all.

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Pete F
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