Enclosure, Callanafersy, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Beneath the foundations of a modern house on a low hillock near Callanafersy, the outline of an ancient enclosure has effectively ceased to exist as a physical presence, yet it persisted on paper long enough to leave a quietly puzzling trace in the cartographic record.
The site is invisible at ground level, sitting in undulating pasture roughly 400 metres northeast of the River Laune, and it offers nothing to the eye of a passing visitor.
What makes the place worth a moment's attention is the way successive Ordnance Survey maps recorded it differently. The 1846 six-inch map showed what appeared to be a small subrectangular field, approximately 50 metres northwest to southeast and 30 metres northeast to southwest. By the time the 1895 six-inch map was produced, the same feature had been reinterpreted or had physically changed: it was recorded as a semicircular enclosure occupying the northeastern side of a field. Whether surveyors were reading the same earthwork differently across half a century, or whether the enclosure itself had been partially altered or eroded in the intervening years, is no longer easy to establish. Enclosures of this general type in Kerry are often associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes forming the surrounding boundary of a ringfort or farmstead, though nothing in what survives here allows that identification with certainty. A modern house now occupies much of the site, which means whatever archaeology remained has almost certainly been disturbed beyond recovery.
