Enclosure, Bunbinnia, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Bunbinnia, Co. Kerry

In the wet uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula, a ring of stones sits in a field that the Ordnance Survey never thought worth marking.

The enclosure at Bunbinnia is easy to miss in every sense: a single course of rough stone, barely proud of the ground, tracing an oval roughly 8.5 metres by 7.9 metres across. A gap of about two metres on the southern side is all that signals an entrance. Without that deliberate opening, you might walk across the whole thing and take it for a natural scatter.

The site lies on the western bank of the Gearhameen river, positioned midway between two small mountain lakes, Lough Duff and Lough Reagh. Circular stone enclosures of this kind are a recurring feature of the Irish landscape, and they tend to be associated with early medieval settlement or agricultural activity, serving as enclosures for livestock, as boundaries around a dwelling, or as some combination of both. The precise date and function of the Bunbinnia example is not known, and the absence of any OS mapping means it slipped outside the usual channels through which such places accumulate names and narratives. What survives is minimal: one course of stones, a southern entrance, and a location that suggests someone once chose this particular stretch of riverbank, between two lakes, as a place worth enclosing.

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