Enclosure, Crinagort, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Crinagort, Co. Kerry

On a north-west-facing slope above the valley of the Sheen River in south-west Kerry, a small oval enclosure sits on a natural terrace cut into rough hill pasture.

It is easy to overlook: the bank defining its perimeter is only about twenty centimetres high and a little over a metre wide, built from earth and stone, and the entrance at the southern side is marked by nothing more than a few low stones set just half a metre apart. Yet the care taken in its construction is quietly evident. Whoever built it levelled the interior by raising the south-western portion and cutting into the hillside on the south-eastern side, so that the ground within sits roughly flat despite the slope outside.

The enclosure measures approximately nineteen metres on its north-east to south-west axis and twelve metres across, an oval footprint that is typical of a class of early field or settlement enclosure found across Ireland, though dating such structures without excavation is difficult. What gives this particular site a little more context is its relationship to the surrounding landscape. Two relict field boundaries, the remnants of ancient land divisions now reduced to earthen traces, survive roughly sixty metres to the north-north-west and forty metres to the north-east. Together, the enclosure and these boundaries suggest a small pocket of organised agricultural activity on what is now open hill grazing, a fragment of a worked landscape that has otherwise disappeared into the hillside.

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Pete F
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