Enclosure, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Baurearagh, Co. Kerry

On the south-east bank of a tributary of the Baurearagh River, in a narrow mountain valley in south-west Kerry, sits a small enclosure whose most striking feature is what its builders did not build.

The eastern side of this D-shaped space is not a wall at all but a vertical face of outcropping rock, roughly seven metres long, pressed into service as a ready-made boundary. Someone, at some point, simply built a curving drystone wall to complete the shape, letting the landscape do half the work.

The structure is modest in every measurable sense. The wall spans approximately 2.7 metres east to west, and what remains of it rises only between 0.3 and 0.6 metres, with a thickness of around 0.65 metres. Drystone construction, which relies on carefully fitted stones without mortar, is common across Kerry's uplands and can date to almost any period from prehistory onwards, which makes enclosures like this one difficult to pin down without excavation. Much of the wall has collapsed, and only the lowest course of stones still protrudes above the bog that has crept up around it. The rough pasture setting, the encroaching peat, and the general silence of a mountain valley have done their work quietly and thoroughly over the years.

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Pete F
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