Enclosure, Caher, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Caher, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Roughty River valley in County Kerry, a fragment of ancient drystone walling curves through grazing pasture, the surviving remnant of what was once a substantial oval enclosure.

Most of it is gone, cleared away at some point during agricultural tidying of the land, but the arc that remains still traces a graceful line roughly 58 metres from north to south, the wall standing between 0.3 and 0.8 metres high and about 1.4 metres thick. An entrance gap nearly three metres wide survives at the south-south-east, and though it now serves the practical needs of a working farm, its width and placement suggest something more deliberate than a later convenience.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1895, the enclosure was recorded as an oval roughly 80 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south, a considerable size. Enclosures of this type, defined by a circular or oval drystone boundary wall, are a common enough feature of the Irish landscape, used across a broad sweep of prehistory and the early medieval period variously as farmsteads, stock enclosures, or defended settlements. What makes this one quietly interesting is the evidence of its partial survival alongside the evidence of its partial destruction. Local knowledge attributes the missing sections of wall to field clearance, the stones almost certainly reused elsewhere on the farm, a pattern repeated countless times across Kerry and beyond. The farm road that runs along the eastern arc of the enclosure hints that the boundary line was still legible enough, or respected enough, to shape how the land was divided and worked even after much of the wall itself had been taken apart.

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Pete F
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