Enclosure, Cois Chomarach, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
A small circular field sitting in boggy pasture near Derriana Lough in south Kerry might not announce itself as anything out of the ordinary.
But look closely at the southern boundary and the wall begins to speak a different language: upright slabs and flat stones set on edge, forming what is known as revetment, a facing technique used to shore up and define a structure from the outside. The wall, still standing to around half a metre in height and measuring roughly 1.4 metres thick, encloses an area of approximately 15 metres north to south and 14 metres east to west. That near-circular shape, preserved today as a field boundary, is almost certainly the original footprint of an ancient enclosure, the kind of modest but deliberate construction that dots the Irish landscape from the early medieval period onward.
The site appears on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey maps as a small enclosure, and by the time the second edition was produced the approximately circular outline was still legible in the landscape. Inside, the ground is crossed by a series of cultivation ridges, the long parallel earthworks left by generations of spade or plough tillage, which suggests the interior was worked as agricultural land at some point in its history. Whether the enclosure itself was originally built to protect a farmstead, define a garden or garden plot, or serve some other function is not recorded, but the combination of a thick reveted wall and an interior given over to cultivation ridges points to a site with a practical, domestic character rather than a ceremonial one. The survey of the Iveragh Peninsula by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, provides the primary record of what survives here.