Enclosure, Dromroe, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Dromroe, Co. Kerry

On a hillside in south-west Kerry, a small D-shaped enclosure sits half-absorbed by bog, its drystone walls still just visible above the peat surface.

It measures only 7.4 metres east to west, with a straight western side running nine metres along what was once a field boundary, and a narrow entrance, barely 0.7 metres wide, opening to the north-east. Small as it is, the care taken in its construction is legible even now: the western side has been cut half a metre into the upslope so the interior sits level, and the south-eastern floor is raised slightly to compensate further for the angle of the hill. Someone, at some point, went to considerable trouble to make this modest space workable.

The enclosure sits on an east-facing slope above the valley of the Dromoghty River, embedded within a wider network of relict field boundaries, the ghostly geometry of a farming landscape that has long since been abandoned to rough pasture and bog. A drystone enclosure of this kind, defined by a collapsed rubble wall with a thickness of around 0.6 metres, would typically have served as a small stock enclosure or a sheltered working space associated with seasonal upland farming. What gives the site additional interest is its relationship to a hut site immediately to the south, the two structures sitting side by side on the hillslope as a pair, suggesting a more sustained, if modest, human presence. Together they are the residue of a way of life that was common across Irish uplands for centuries before population pressure, famine, and economic change drove people back down to the valleys.

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Pete F
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