Enclosure, Erneen, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slopes of Barrerneen in County Kerry, a small oval enclosure sits in rough, heather-covered hill pasture, its drystone walls slowly losing the argument with gravity.

The structure measures roughly ten metres north to south and six and a half metres east to west, and whoever built it thought carefully about the lay of the land: the northern interior was cut sixty centimetres into the hillside to create a level floor where the slope would otherwise have made the space unusable. That kind of deliberate terracing is easy to miss when you are looking at a collapsed ruin, but it points to a builder who intended the place to function, not merely to stand.

Drystone enclosures of this type, built without mortar and relying entirely on the careful placement of stones, appear throughout upland Kerry and are notoriously difficult to date without excavation. They served a range of purposes across different periods, from livestock management to seasonal sheltering. What makes this particular example worth pausing over is its context. Two hut sites lie close by, one roughly twenty metres to the north and another approximately eighty metres to the northwest, suggesting that the enclosure was not an isolated feature but part of a small cluster of related structures. The wall survives best along its northern arc, rising to about eighty centimetres, while the interior is now largely covered in rubble, the collapsed remnants of the wall's own upper courses.

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Pete F
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