Enclosure, Coolnagoppoge, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Coolnagoppoge, Co. Kerry

On the upland terrain of Coolnagoppoge near Kilgarvan in County Kerry, there is a dry-stone enclosure with an oddly specific shape: broadly rectangular at its southern end, it gradually tapers northward until the walls converge to a point barely two and a half metres across.

The overall structure runs 22 metres from south to north, widening to 12 metres at its base. It is the kind of feature that could easily be walked past, its walls reduced in many places to just two or three courses of unmortared stone, the interior thick with rushes.

The enclosure was identified ahead of wind farm development in the area, which brought archaeological survey work to a landscape that might otherwise have passed without close scrutiny. Its construction follows the dry-stone tradition common across the Irish countryside, where walls are built without mortar from whatever local stone lay to hand, the pieces stacked roughly horizontally but with the occasional diagonal or upright stone worked in for stability. A centrally placed entrance, about one and a half metres wide, punctuates the southern wall, and a narrow overgrown trackway still leads up to it from the south, the ghost of a path that animals or their keepers once used regularly. The rushes now crowding the interior are telling: rush growth of that density typically signals ground enriched by animal dung over a long period, suggesting the enclosure functioned as a pen or fold, most likely during the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The western wall has suffered most from time, undermined by a stream running immediately to that side, which has eroded the base of the stonework and caused partial collapse along that face.

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Pete F
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