Enclosure, Crossderry, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a south-facing slope of boggy pasture beside the Curraghalia stream in County Kerry, a small enclosure sits in the ground almost apologetically.
It measures roughly six metres by five and a half, its walls rising only about forty centimetres from the surface and spreading perhaps seventy centimetres wide. By the standards of Irish field monuments, it is modest to the point of near-invisibility, the kind of structure that a farmer or walker might cross without a second thought.
What makes it quietly compelling is precisely that crudeness. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is simply a defined space bounded by an earthen or stone bank, and they turn up across Ireland in enormous variety, from elaborate ringforts associated with early medieval settlement to simple stock enclosures of uncertain date. This one, recorded on the Iveragh Peninsula in South Kerry, was described by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the peninsula as crudely built, which in archaeological language is not a dismissal but an observation. Rough construction often points to a functional, unceremoniousness purpose, perhaps temporary animal management or a field boundary that never needed to impress anyone. The boggy, sloping ground beside the stream would have been marginal land, useful but not prime, which itself hints at a practical rather than a domestic or ritual origin.