Enclosure, Boolacullane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Boolacullane, Co. Kerry

There is nothing obviously archaeological about the fields at Boolacullane in County Kerry.

Walk the ground and you will find no banks, no visible boundaries, no trace of any ancient structure. The site was originally reported as the low remains of a small enclosure, but inspection confirmed that no surface evidence survives whatsoever. What appeared on older Ordnance Survey and Cassini maps as a small pentagonal field, with a triangular field abutting it to the north, has been largely erased by agricultural activity over the years, its boundary walls or earthworks removed and its layout dissolved into the wider farmland.

Yet the place is more interesting than a blank field suggests. When aerial photography was analysed, cropmarks revealed the outline of a large enclosure at this location, one that spreads across the pentagonal field and into the fields to the north and east. Cropmarks form when buried or disturbed ground affects the growth of surface vegetation, producing patterns visible from the air but imperceptible at eye level. The enclosure indicated by these marks is considerably larger than the modest feature originally reported, and its eastern boundary appears to have been cut through by a minor road. The field boundaries associated with the old pentagonal and triangular fields are still faintly legible on the ground as shallow linear depressions, the ghost outlines left by removed drainage channels. More recent land drains run across the whole area on a northeast to southwest axis, and their course becomes noticeably irregular over the supposed monument, which may itself reflect the presence of buried archaeological material disturbing consistent drainage. A possible fosse, the external ditch typically surrounding an enclosure, can be traced as a gentle arc running north to northeast in the field immediately to the north, and this is one of the only physical hints, however subtle, that something deliberate once occupied this land.

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Pete F
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