Enclosure, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cashelkeelty, Co. Kerry

On the lower north-east-facing slopes of Knocknaveacal in south-west Kerry, a roughly D-shaped enclosure emerges from the blanket bog in a way that makes you reconsider the landscape around it.

The wall that defines most of its perimeter is low, in places barely five centimetres above the peat surface, yet it traces a clear and deliberate curve across the hillside for the better part of a hundred metres east to west. Where the western boundary would have needed to be built, the builders simply used what was already there: a line of outcropping rock and cliff face, forty-eight metres of natural stone incorporated directly into the enclosure's edge.

The construction itself is drystone, meaning no mortar was used, the stones laid and fitted against one another by hand. What makes the walling here slightly unusual is that some of the upright lower-course stones are set at right angles to the line of the wall rather than running parallel to it, a detail that speaks to deliberate technique rather than casual stacking. The entire structure is elongated and asymmetrical in plan, measuring roughly a hundred metres east to west and about ninety-five metres north to south at the wider eastern end. The enclosure is not empty ground. Three hut sites cluster in its south-eastern sector, the remains of small, probably circular or oval structures that would once have served as shelters or dwellings. A fourth hut site lies just outside the enclosure, twenty-four metres to the south, suggesting that activity here extended beyond whatever boundary the main wall was meant to define.

The bogland that now covers much of the area would have built up gradually over centuries, and the wall's partial submergence beneath peat is one reason the site reads so quietly in the landscape. Visitors crossing the rough hill pasture of Cashelkeelty can follow the line of stones where they protrude above the bog surface, tracing the arc of an enclosure whose original function, whether agricultural, pastoral, or domestic, is left open by what survives.

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Pete F
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