Enclosure, Cummers, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In a bog in Cummers, County Kerry, a ring of old stonework breaks the surface just enough to suggest that something deliberate once happened here.
The wall emerges intermittently from the peat, rarely more than thirty centimetres above ground, and traces a circle roughly eight and a half metres across. It is the kind of thing you could walk past without registering it as anything other than a scatter of field stones, were it not for the clear geometry underneath.
The structure sits within a larger radial stone enclosure, a type of monument in which walls extend outward from a central point like the spokes of a wheel, sometimes associated with early land division or settlement activity. This smaller circular feature sits off-centre within that enclosure, pushed towards the north-west rather than occupying the middle ground. Its wall, about seventy centimetres thick where it can be measured, is best preserved along the north-east to west arc. The bog, which has gradually claimed much of the site over time, actually helps explain why anything survives at all; peat is a remarkable preservative, and the portions of wall that have remained buried beneath even a shallow covering of perhaps twenty centimetres have fared considerably better than those exposed to the elements above.