Enclosure, Dromteewakeen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
At Dromteewakeen in County Kerry, what survives of a stone enclosure is almost nothing: a collapsed arc of masonry, barely a quarter of a metre high and just over half a metre wide, curving around a space that once measured roughly three metres across.
It is the kind of feature that a walker could step over without noticing, yet its circular form places it within a broad family of enclosed sites that dot the Irish landscape, from substantial cashels built of dry-stone walling to more modest circular enclosures whose original purpose, whether domestic, agricultural, or ritual, is often unclear.
The site on the Iveragh Peninsula was recorded and described by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of South Kerry, published by Cork University Press, which systematically catalogued the remarkable density of archaeological remains across this part of Munster. The Iveragh Peninsula, best known today for the Ring of Kerry, holds an exceptionally high concentration of early medieval and prehistoric sites, and small enclosures like this one are part of that pattern. The internal diameter of just under three metres is modest even by the standards of a simple ringfort, and the degree of collapse makes any further interpretation difficult without excavation.