Enclosure, Carran, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carran, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope in Carran, County Kerry, there is an ancient enclosure that you cannot see by standing in it.

Walk the rough pasture here and there is nothing to indicate that anything lies beneath your feet. The only evidence for this site comes from a single aerial photograph taken in 1973, in which a cropmark, the faint differential in how grass and crops grow over buried archaeology, reveals the outline of an oval enclosure roughly 40 metres across its north-east to south-west axis and about 30 metres across its north-west to south-east axis. A possible entrance break is visible at the south-east. Then the photograph ends, and so does the record.

Cropmark archaeology depends on buried features altering the soil above them in ways that only become legible from altitude and, often, only under particular conditions of drought or low sun. An enclosure of this kind, oval and of modest but not insignificant size, would typically have served as a farmstead or settlement boundary in early medieval Ireland, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about date or function. What gives this particular site an additional layer of quietly strange geography is its outlook. The slope faces south towards The Paps of Dana, the two rounded twin hills in the Derrynasaggart Mountains whose form has long been associated with the goddess Anu, a figure from Irish mythology connected with fertility and the land. Whether or not any of the people who built or used this enclosure understood that view as meaningful, they would have looked out at the same hills every day.

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Pete F
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