Enclosure, Cleedagh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Cleedagh, Co. Kerry

On a north-west-facing slope in Cleedagh, County Kerry, a circular arrangement in the ground barely announces itself.

The grass is improved and lush, the pasture well-kept, and yet just beneath the agricultural surface something older persists: a small enclosure, roughly eight metres across, traceable only as a low scarp and a faint rise in the ground. It is the kind of monument that a farming landscape has done its best to forget.

The enclosure is one of three in the area, and what survives is modest by any measure. A scarp, the term for a slope or edge formed where ground has been cut or has subsided, defines the circle from the north-west around to the south-west, running to a width of about 1.25 metres and rising just ten centimetres above the surrounding ground. On the downslope to the north, where erosion and agricultural improvement have had the most effect, even that slight definition softens further, the scarp widening to 2.5 metres but dropping to a height of only twenty centimetres. To the west, a field boundary running north-west to south-east, alongside a tertiary road, cuts directly into the monument, truncating whatever once completed the circuit. To the east, the levelled remains of another former field boundary can still be detected, its line matching one recorded on Ordnance Survey historic mapping, suggesting the landscape here has been reorganised and rearranged across multiple generations, each one pressing a little further into what came before. The enclosure itself, small and low as it is, has survived not by being protected but simply by being overlooked.

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Pete F
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