Enclosure, Carrigane, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrigane, Co. Kerry

In a field at Carrigane in north Kerry, there is a low, roughly rectangular mound that was once something quite different.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1914 recorded it as a roughly circular enclosure, nearly forty metres across, with a clear break in its bank on the north-east side. By the time anyone looked closely enough to measure what remained, much of that form had been lost to levelling, leaving a mound no more than sixty centimetres high at its tallest external edge.

What makes the site quietly arresting is a label applied by an earlier generation of surveyors. The Ordnance Survey maps of 1841 to 1842 marked this ground as "Kyle burial ground". The word "kyle" derives from the Irish "coill", meaning a wood or grove, and its appearance in placename records often signals an early ecclesiastical connection, the kind of enclosed ground associated with a small church or monastic cell, long since vanished. Whether that was the case here is not certain, but the designation suggests this circular earthwork was regarded, at least in the nineteenth century, as a place set apart for the dead. Circular enclosures of this type, formed by an earthen bank defining a roughly round interior, appear throughout Ireland in association with early medieval religious sites, though they can also be secular in origin. Just to the east of the Carrigane enclosure lies a ringfort, a type of circular farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, and the proximity of the two features is the sort of detail that tends to prompt questions rather than answer them.

Very little of the original form survives at ground level today, and the site rewards patience more than spectacle. The mound is low and easily overlooked, its history more legible on old maps than in the landscape itself.

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Pete F
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