Enclosure, Doon, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Doon, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing hillside near Doon in County Kerry, there was once a semi-circular enclosure of the kind that dots the Irish landscape in various states of survival, the kind of site that rarely makes headlines but quietly marks centuries of human activity.

By the time surveyors came to record it, it had already been reduced to a five-metre-wide spread of bulldozed earth and small stones pushed into what had been the interior. Modern rubbish had been tipped in alongside, turning an archaeological feature into an impromptu dump.

The Ordnance Survey's second edition maps had recorded the enclosure clearly enough, showing it bisected by a modern roadway, which complicates any estimate of its original size. The surviving area measured roughly nineteen metres east to west, though that figure reflects only what the road left intact. A more realistic estimate for the full east-west width sits closer to twenty-nine metres. Enclosures of this type, roughly circular or semi-circular earthworks defined by a bank and often a ditch, are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though without excavation it is rarely possible to be precise about date or function. In this case, no trace of a ditch could be found, either because none ever existed or because the same machinery that flattened the banks removed any evidence of one. The surrounding land had been amalgamated and reseeded for grass-growing, the kind of agricultural intensification that accelerated across Ireland in the latter decades of the twentieth century and claimed a considerable number of low-lying earthworks in the process. The site was recorded by Michael Connolly during a survey of the Lee Valley area carried out in 1996 and 1997, by which point the damage was already done.

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