Enclosure, Coolroe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In a field of improved pasture on a north-facing slope in Coolroe, Co. Kerry, there is almost nothing left to see.
Almost. A circular earthwork, roughly 28 metres across, survives here as a barely perceptible rise in the ground, its bank standing no more than 40 centimetres above the interior and a mere 10 centimetres above the field outside. This is an enclosure, the kind of roughly circular earthen boundary that appears throughout the Irish landscape and often dates to the early medieval period, though without excavation the age of any individual example remains uncertain. What makes this one quietly interesting is not what survives, but the degree to which the landscape has quietly consumed it.
The western side of the monument appears to have been cut through by a later field boundary running northwest to southeast, effectively truncating the arc that once closed off that portion of the circle. On the northern side, a different process has taken place. An earth and stone boundary running northeast to southwest seems to have been laid out in deliberate deference to the enclosure's curve, following a line that the enclosure itself once defined, even though the original bank along that arc is no longer visible and has been absorbed entirely into the field. That boundary is now heavily overgrown with whitethorn and briars, a dense tangle that marks the ghost of the older feature. Further evidence for the site's former clarity comes from the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, Ireland's earliest systematic large-scale survey, compiled in the nineteenth century, which records an irregular sub-oval feature at this precise location. By the time surveyors visited in more recent years, even that outline had largely faded into the grass.
