Enclosure, Derrymaclavlode, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a south-westerly hillside in County Kerry, among rock outcrops and rough pasture above the Clydagh River valley, a small drystone enclosure quietly continues doing what it may always have done: keeping sheep in.
That continuity of purpose is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about it. The walls that define this roughly oval space, measuring just over six metres east to west and under five metres north to south, were stacked without mortar by hands whose identity and era remain unrecorded. Drystone construction, which relies entirely on the careful placement of stones without binding material, is one of the oldest and most persistent building techniques in Ireland, and structures of this kind can range from early medieval to post-medieval in date.
The enclosure is modest in its dimensions but deliberate in its design. The base of the wall is 0.6 metres thick, tapering to 0.3 metres at its surviving height of 1.4 metres, and a single entrance one metre wide faces north. Two additional drystone walls, each running roughly eight metres in length, abut the outer face of the enclosure near the entrance, one to the north-west and one to the north-east, suggesting that animals were funnelled toward the gap rather than simply left to approach it freely. Parts of the enclosure wall have been rebuilt at some point, making it difficult to read the original fabric cleanly. Around four metres to the west, a hut site survives alongside it, hinting that whoever tended this place, and whatever it was originally built for, may have lived very close by.