Enclosure, Derry, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
A low-lying bog in County Kerry is not the most obvious place to find a well-preserved earthwork, yet somewhere in the townland of Derry on the Iveragh Peninsula, a subcircular enclosure sits quietly in the wet ground, bisected by a north-south track that cuts straight through its bank.
That a modern path has simply been driven through it rather than around it says something about how unremarkable such features can appear to the untrained eye, even when they survive in quite good condition.
The enclosure is a ringfort-type structure of the kind once common across Ireland, typically built during the early medieval period as a defended farmstead or settlement enclosure. The bank here is composed of earth and gravel, and it survives best on its western and southern sides, where it still stands 1.8 metres high on the interior face and 2.5 metres on the exterior. Its basal width averages around 8 metres, and the enclosed area measures roughly 19 metres north to south by 14.5 metres east to west, which is modest but not unusual for this type of monument. The bank is heavily overgrown and is broken only by that north-south track, which connects the site to the adjacent modern road. The second edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded it as a small circular enclosure, indicating it was noted and mapped at least as far back as the nineteenth century, even if its significance was not always widely appreciated. Its presence in low-lying bog rather than on higher ground, which is the more typical setting for such enclosures, makes it a slightly anomalous example within the broader landscape of the peninsula.