Enclosure, Dromkeare, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Dromkeare, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, there is a place on the map where an ancient enclosure used to be.

The circular enclosure at Dromkeare was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map, meaning it survived long enough to be measured and drawn in the nineteenth century, but it no longer exists in any physical sense. It was levelled during land improvement operations in the 1930s, and whatever remained after that was cleared again in the early 1990s. What had once been a defined feature in the landscape is now, to all appearances, ordinary ground.

Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used from roughly the early medieval period onward. They vary considerably in scale and construction, from substantial earthen banks to stone-built cashels, and their presence in a landscape usually signals long-term settlement and land use. The Dromkeare example sat on a low ridge with views south over Lough Currane, a large lake near Waterville that drains into the Atlantic. That position, elevated enough to overlook water, is entirely typical of how such sites were placed. The 1930s clearance was not unusual either; land improvement schemes across rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century removed countless earthworks that had survived for over a thousand years, often with no record beyond what the OS surveyors had already noted a century earlier.

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