Enclosure, Dromlusk, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Dromlusk, Co. Kerry

In the forestry plantations of Dromlusk in County Kerry, two small circular features sit quietly beneath the canopy, their outlines recorded on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map as nothing more than a pair of modest rings.

They are tentatively identified as enclosures, though even that word carries more certainty than the archaeology fully warrants.

What makes them particularly interesting is their size. Enclosures in the Irish landscape come in many forms and served many purposes, from the substantial ringforts that housed farming families to more modest enclosures associated with cattle management or religious activity. The scale of these two features at Dromlusk points toward a specific and relatively obscure category: fionnán enclosures. These are thought to be small enclosures associated with the management or storage of fionnán grass, a coarse rush-like grass once harvested for use as bedding or thatching material. If that identification is correct, they would represent a very ordinary but largely unrecorded aspect of early rural land use, the kind of practical agricultural infrastructure that rarely survives in memory or documentation. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, compiling their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula for Cork University Press in 1996, noted the features and offered this tentative interpretation.

The mature forestry plantation that now covers the site means that little, if anything, is visible at ground level today. The enclosures exist more as cartographic ghosts than as features a visitor could easily identify, their presence preserved mainly in the older map record rather than in the landscape itself.

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