Enclosure, Coomcallee, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Coomcallee, Co. Kerry

On the north-facing slopes of Macgillycuddy's Reeks, above the Gaddagh River, a small D-shaped enclosure sits in rough upland pasture, its eastern side formed not by a wall but by a natural scarp cut into the hillside.

That detail alone sets it apart from the more familiar circular enclosures scattered across Kerry's uplands. The roughly two-metre drop of the scarp does part of the work a builder would otherwise have done in stone, while a partially collapsed drystone wall, still standing to around 1.45 metres in places and nearly a metre thick, curves around from south to north to complete the boundary. The entrance, just under a metre wide, opens at the northeast.

The enclosure measures 4.6 metres east to west, making it a compact structure, the kind of sheltered space that in an upland context would most plausibly have served as a pen for animals or a temporary working area during seasonal use of the high ground. About 25 metres to the southeast, a recorded hut site suggests this was not an isolated feature but part of a small cluster of activity, people and livestock making use of the Reeks' lower slopes in a pattern that would have repeated across many generations. Coomcallee itself sits in a quiet fold of the mountains, a place where the Gaddagh drains southward toward the Black Valley, and the landscape still carries the feel of somewhere worked at the margins rather than settled at the centre.

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Pete F
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