Enclosure, Derrybanane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derrybanane, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope in the rough hill pasture of Derrybanane in County Kerry, something small and deliberate interrupts the landscape.

A D-shaped enclosure, barely two and a half metres across at its widest east-west span, sits defined by a curving drystone wall on most sides, with its straight western edge formed by an existing north-south field boundary. The entrance, just fifty-five centimetres wide, faces east. The whole thing is currently swallowed by dense fern growth, which makes it easy to miss and harder still to read.

Small enclosures of this kind are scattered across the Irish uplands, and their purposes vary considerably. Some were stock enclosures used to isolate animals, others served as garden plots, herb gardens, or bee gardens attached to early monastic or domestic settlements. The drystone construction, where stones are laid without mortar, is one of the oldest building techniques in Ireland, requiring considerable skill to produce walls of any height with structural integrity. Here the surviving wall stands to 1.2 metres and runs 0.65 metres thick, modest dimensions but solid enough to have endured whatever combination of weather and neglect the Kerry hills have offered. The fact that one side of the enclosure is simply borrowed from a pre-existing field boundary suggests a practical, opportunistic approach to construction rather than a planned, freestanding structure.

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Pete F
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