Enclosure, Cathair Bó Sine, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the lower eastern slopes of Lateevemore, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a place recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map as an enclosure, marked by a small circle of hachures, those fine radiating lines surveyors once used to suggest the rise and fall of earthworks.
That marking is all that remains of it. The feature itself has not survived, and nobody is entirely certain what it was.
The name attached to the site, Cathair Bó Sine, is suggestive in its own right. A cathair in Irish archaeology typically refers to a stone ringfort, a circular enclosure bounded by dry-stone walling, of the kind scattered across the limestone and sandstone landscapes of Munster. Whether this site was ever truly a cathair, or something else entirely, remains unresolved. Its classification is listed simply as not known. What can be said is that when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in the nineteenth century, there was still enough visible on the ground to warrant a notation. By the time J. Cuppage documented the Dingle Peninsula in a comprehensive archaeological survey published in 1986, only the map memory remained.
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