Enclosure, Doocarrig More, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the lower slopes of Killeen Mountain in County Kerry, there is an archaeological site that nobody walking the land would ever find.
It exists, as far as ground-level observation is concerned, not at all. The only evidence for it is a ghostly ring visible in an aerial photograph taken in 1973, a circular mark pressed into the rough pasture, roughly fifteen metres across, betraying something buried beneath the surface that the eye at ground level simply cannot detect.
What the photograph captured is what archaeologists call a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features, walls, ditches, or filled pits, affect the growth of vegetation above them in ways that become legible only from the air. Soil that was once disturbed retains moisture differently to undisturbed ground, and those differences register in the colour and height of whatever is growing above. In this case, the mark describes a circular enclosure, the kind of form associated throughout Ireland with settlement and ritual activity across a very broad span of prehistoric and early historic time. About a hundred metres to the south-west sits a rath, which is a ringfort, a raised earthen enclosure typically associated with early medieval farmsteads, and the proximity of the two features to one another suggests this stretch of mountain pasture was a place people organised and returned to over a considerable period.