Enclosure, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

On a rocky, west-facing slope in Drombohilly, County Kerry, a small circular enclosure sits in rough pasture, low enough to be easily missed and grass-covered enough to seem, at first glance, like nothing more than a slight undulation in the hillside.

It measures nine metres across, and what survives of its boundary wall, collapsed now to around forty centimetres in height, runs most distinctly along the west to west-south-west arc. The builders used a double-skin technique: upright stones set contiguously in two rows, inner and outer, with a rubble core packed between them. This kind of drystone construction, assembled without mortar, was standard practice across early Irish enclosures and can still be read clearly in the stonework despite centuries of collapse and turf accumulation.

The entrance, positioned at the north-north-west, is marked by a single upright stone slab set perpendicular to the wall line, a detail that gives the structure a deliberate, finished quality rather than the appearance of a casual field boundary. Perhaps more telling is what the builders did with the interior: the south-east portion of the floor is artificially raised by roughly half a metre, a practical response to building on sloping ground, levelling the usable space against the natural incline of the hillside. About sixteen metres to the north, a relict field system survives in the same landscape, the two features together suggesting that this corner of Drombohilly was once a worked and organised place, its enclosure and fields part of the same human effort to make something ordered from a rocky western slope.

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Pete F
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