Enclosure, Bohereens, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Bohereens, Co. Kerry

There is a particular category of archaeological site that exists more as an absence than a presence.

At Bohereens in County Kerry, what was once reported as the low remains of a small enclosure has effectively vanished from the surface entirely. The surrounding area is level pasture with short, close-cropped grass, and no physical trace of the structure can be identified underfoot. It is, in the most literal sense, invisible to anyone standing on it.

What redeems it from total obscurity is aerial photography. Colour aerial imagery captured by Ordnance Survey Ireland in 2010 revealed two conjoined sub-circular cropmarks, side by side in the field. Cropmarks form when buried features, walls, ditches, or foundations alter how the soil retains moisture, causing the vegetation above them to grow differently, often darker or lighter than the surrounding grass, in a pattern visible only from height. The Bohereens site is one of a matched pair, its companion being a second enclosure recorded nearby. Together they describe two roughly circular spaces that once adjoined each other, their outlines now legible only in the differential growth of grass above ground that has long since swallowed whatever stood there.

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