Enclosure, Curragh More, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Curragh More, Co. Kerry

On the north bank of the Cummeenduff river in County Kerry, a low grassy ring sits in the landscape without so much as a mark on the Ordnance Survey maps to acknowledge it.

It is a subcircular enclosure, its boundary preserved as a sod-covered stony bank roughly sixty centimetres high, enclosing a roughly circular space about eight and a half metres across. Small, unassuming, and cartographically invisible, it is the kind of feature that rewards anyone who knows to look for it.

Enclosures of this general type are among the most common yet least understood archaeological features in the Irish countryside. They range from the well-known ringfort, a defended farmstead of the early medieval period typically enclosed by an earthen bank and ditch, to far older and harder to classify structures whose original purpose remains a matter of debate. Without excavation, this particular example at Curragh More resists easy categorisation. Its modest diameter would make it small even by ringfort standards, and the absence of any recorded ditch adds further ambiguity. What it does preserve, quietly and without fanfare, is the outline of a human decision made at some point in the past to define a space, gather stone, and build a boundary in this corner of the Iveragh Peninsula.

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