Enclosure, Coad, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a natural plateau above Cove Harbour in south Kerry, a circular enclosure once existed that is now entirely invisible.
No bank, no ditch, no scatter of stone marks the ground. The only evidence that anything was ever here is a line drawn on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, that meticulous mid-nineteenth-century effort to record the Irish landscape before so much of it changed or disappeared. The enclosure has since been absorbed into ordinary pasture, leaving a gap where an archaeological feature ought to be.
Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, ranging from prehistoric ringforts, which were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval landowners, to enclosures of less certain date and function. What this one looked like, how old it was, or what it enclosed is no longer recoverable from the ground itself. The plateau setting, overlooking the harbour to the south-east, suggests a position chosen with some intention, whether for visibility, for defence, or simply for the well-drained elevated ground that such sites often favoured. By the time researchers working on the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula documented the location in the 1990s, nothing physical remained to examine.