Enclosure, Deelis, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Deelis, Co. Kerry

A circular earthwork barely seven and a half metres across sits in rough pasture on a gentle north-facing slope south-east of the Drimminboy River in Deelis, Kerry, and it is easy to walk past without registering what you are looking at.

The ground inside the ring sits roughly forty centimetres higher than the ground outside it, and the enclosing bank of earth and stone still stands to about three-quarters of a metre on its outer face. Stones push through the grass along the bank's crest. The whole thing is quiet and slightly ambiguous, which is precisely what makes it interesting.

This kind of small circular enclosure is a feature of the Irish landscape that tends to attract cautious descriptions from archaeologists, and with good reason. Enclosures of this scale and construction could represent a ringfort, the remains of a domestic settlement from the early medieval period, or something older still. A ringfort, to put it simply, is a farmstead enclosed by one or more earthen or stone banks, a form of rural settlement that was common in Ireland from roughly the sixth to the tenth centuries. The bank here, about 1.6 metres wide and built from earth with stone mixed through it, fits within that general tradition, though without excavation no precise date can be assigned. What adds a small note of pathos to the picture is a modern field boundary, running on a north-south axis, that cuts straight through the western sector of the enclosure, the kind of agricultural pragmatism that has quietly altered thousands of similar monuments across the country over the centuries.

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Pete F
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