Enclosure, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Drombohilly, Co. Kerry

On a northwest-facing slope above Kenmare Bay, a circular drystone enclosure sits in rough hill pasture, its interior conspicuously level despite the gradient of the hill around it.

That levelness is not accidental. Whoever built this nine-metre-wide structure went to the considerable trouble of cutting into the upslope on the southeast side and raising the ground on the northwest side to create a flat platform, the cut reaching roughly forty centimetres down and the raised portion standing about sixty centimetres above the natural slope. It is the kind of deliberate, careful groundwork that suggests the interior space mattered, that something was meant to happen there, or be kept there, on even ground.

The enclosure itself is modest in its surviving form, a drystone wall, the technique of stacking unmortared stone that is ubiquitous across the Irish landscape, reduced now to a thickness of about sixty centimetres and a height of forty centimetres. Two contiguous stone slabs survive along the northwest arc, possibly remnants of a more substantial structural element. What lends the site its broader interest is its setting within a wider pattern of ancient land use. A second enclosure sits roughly forty-five metres to the south, and the traces of relict field boundaries, the ghostly outlines of former agricultural divisions that predate any modern use of the land, lie about two hundred and twenty metres to the northeast. Together these fragments suggest that this exposed hillside above the bay was once organised, worked, and divided in ways that the rough pasture now obscures almost entirely.

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Pete F
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