Enclosure, Dromatoor, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Dromatoor, Co. Kerry

On a southward-sloping pasture in Dromatoor, north Kerry, an ancient sub-oval enclosure sits raised almost a metre above the surrounding land, its boundary still sharp enough to catch the eye of anyone crossing the field.

A slight exterior fosse, the shallow ditch that would have reinforced the enclosure's boundary, runs around the outside, still measurable at roughly sixty centimetres wide and thirty centimetres deep. It is a modest feature on the landscape, and easy to walk past without fully registering what it is, yet that raised interior and surviving earthwork speak to a deliberate act of construction from an era when such enclosures served as farmsteads, ceremonial spaces, or places of shelter.

The enclosure measures 24.4 metres north to south and 14.4 metres east to west, giving it an elongated, sub-oval footprint rather than the neat circle more commonly associated with the ringforts of early medieval Ireland. Inside, in the southern sector, are the possible remains of a hut site, now reduced to a horseshoe-shaped arrangement of stone with its open end facing east. A second horseshoe-shaped stone structure sits about four metres to the north, its opening facing in the opposite direction, toward the north. Whether these two structures were contemporary, or whether one was added or adapted at a later point, is not recorded, but their presence side by side within a single enclosure gives the site an unusual interior complexity. The details were documented in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995 by Carol Toal.

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Pete F
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