Enclosure, Derryvorahig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derryvorahig, Co. Kerry

On an east-facing slope above the valley of the Dromoghty River in south-west Kerry, a rough oval of collapsed drystone walling protrudes just above the surface of a bog.

It is not dramatic to look at, measuring roughly nine metres north to south and a little over five metres at its widest point, with a wall that stands no higher than about seventy centimetres where it survives best. What makes it quietly compelling is precisely that survival: a structure old enough to have been swallowed by bog, yet still legible as a shape in the landscape.

The enclosure is the kind of feature that tends to get categorised without being fully understood. Drystone enclosures of this type, built without mortar by stacking and fitting stone, were used for a variety of purposes across different periods of Irish history, from early medieval settlement and agriculture to later livestock management. The western side of this particular wall has fared better than the rest because it was absorbed into a later north-south field boundary, itself part of a broader network of relict field systems in the surrounding hillside. Relict field boundaries are the ghostly remnants of former agricultural landscapes, patterns of enclosure that were once maintained and worked but have since been abandoned and partially reclaimed by vegetation or bog. That this small enclosure became structural to a later wall suggests the landscape here was farmed in successive, overlapping phases, each generation of farmers inheriting and adapting what the last had left behind.

The site sits in rough hill pasture, so access is likely to involve uneven ground and wet underfoot conditions typical of boggy upland terrain in Kerry. The wall is most visible where it meets the later field boundary to the west, and that junction is probably the clearest point from which to read the enclosure's outline against the surrounding slope.

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Pete F
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