Enclosure, Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Fán, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slope of the Glanfahan river valley, in open mountain terrain on the Dingle Peninsula, two ruined structures sit roughly twenty metres apart.

Neither is immediately legible as anything in particular. One is a circular drystone building, now badly deteriorated, with a triangular wall-cupboard set into its western side and a small square chamber built into its northern wall. The chamber measures approximately one metre square and one metre high. The other, a short distance to the east, is the foundation ring of a roughly circular enclosure somewhere between 7.1 and 8.1 metres in diameter. Small things, both of them, and easy to walk past.

The circular structure was recorded by the archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister in 1899, who measured its internal diameter at around 1.8 metres. It stands, or rather survives, at 1.25 metres in height, with walls approximately 1.1 metres thick. Drystone construction of this kind, where stones are laid without mortar and rely entirely on careful coursing and gravity to hold their shape, is ancient practice on the Dingle Peninsula and elsewhere in the west of Ireland. The built-in cupboard and chamber are the details that make this structure slightly harder to categorise. They suggest something more considered than a simple shelter or animal pen, though the purpose remains unclear. Cuppage's archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, published in 1986, recorded the site as part of a broader effort to document the dense concentration of prehistoric and early medieval remains across the peninsula. The enclosure foundations to the east, likely the boundary of a small settlement or farmstead, add context without resolving the question of what this cluster of low stone walls once was.

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