Enclosure, Erneen, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Erneen, Co. Kerry

On a north-facing hillside in Erneen, County Kerry, a near-perfect circle pushes through the surface of the bog.

It is not a rath or a ringfort in the conventional sense, just a collapsed drystone wall, grass and heather grown over it, barely half a metre high and less than a metre thick, tracing an enclosure roughly eight metres across. The bog has swallowed most of it, but the ring endures, slightly raised above the surrounding ground, quietly geometric against the rough hill pasture.

What makes the structure quietly compelling is the evidence of deliberate thinking built into its construction. The northern portion of the interior has been artificially raised by about forty centimetres to counteract the natural slope of the hillside, so that whoever used the space would have had a reasonably level floor. That kind of practical levelling, carried out in drystone and earth on a remote Kerry hillside, implies a settled purpose for the enclosure, whether it served as a livestock pen, a small habitation platform, or something else entirely. The wall itself is a drystone construction, meaning it was built without mortar, relying entirely on the careful placement of stones to hold its form. That it survives at all, even in collapse, on a terrace overlooking a river valley in south-west Kerry, is a small, unremarked persistence.

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Pete F
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