Enclosure, Carrigeencullia, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In a Kerry farmyard, in the shadow of The Paps of Dana, there is an enclosure that cannot be seen.
No wall rises above the grass, no earthwork catches the light at a low angle, no depression in the soil hints at what was once there. The site exists, formally and on record, as a roughly triangular enclosed area, but at ground level it has vanished entirely into the working landscape around it.
What we know of its shape comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map produced in 1893 to 1894, which recorded the enclosure as a small feature, measuring approximately five metres along its WNW to ESE axis and projecting around ten metres to the SSW, abutting a field boundary at its western end. That map captured something that was already, presumably, in decline or near-disappearance. The enclosure type itself is broad; enclosed areas of this kind in rural Ireland range from early medieval farmsteads to ceremonial spaces, their original function often impossible to determine without excavation. Here, nothing above ground remains to offer even a clue. What lingers is the location: a farmyard with a clear south-easterly view toward The Paps of Dana, the twin-peaked hills in the Derrynasaggart Mountains whose silhouette is strongly associated with the goddess Anu in Irish mythology. Whether that alignment was meaningful to whoever built the enclosure is unknown, but it is the kind of coincidence that is difficult to entirely dismiss.