Enclosure, Boulerdah, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Boulerdah, Co. Kerry

On the bogland of Boulerdah in south Kerry, walls of upright and block-like boulders emerge from the peat and then vanish back into it again, as though the ground is in the process of slowly swallowing a settlement whole.

The effect is quietly disorienting: a complex of stone structures that is simultaneously present and absent, readable and incomplete.

At the centre of the complex is a large circular enclosure, roughly 21.6 metres in diameter, with a hut and two adjoining structures built into its eastern sector. Spreading outward to the south, east, and west, a series of linear walls runs on a broadly northeast-to-southwest alignment, with shorter walls meeting them at right angles to form what looks like a field system, the kind of organised agricultural layout familiar from early medieval or prehistoric settlement patterns across Ireland. The walls average about 75 centimetres wide and stand up to 60 centimetres above the bog surface, though portions disappear beneath the peat at irregular intervals. A modern drain cuts across one of the linear walls, and at that point the peat measures 80 centimetres deep, giving some sense of how much of the structure may remain concealed below the surface. The site is recorded in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which remains the principal systematic record of this part of south Kerry's ancient landscape.

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Pete F
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