Enclosure, Feeans, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Some places are recorded precisely because they no longer exist in any visible form.
In the townland of Feeans in north County Kerry, a circular enclosure was carefully mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842, noted in relation to the nearby Toberlury holy well, and then, somewhere between that survey and the next, it simply ceased to register. No earthwork, no raised ground, no crop mark is known to survive. What remains is the outline on an old map and the question of what it once was.
Circular enclosures of this kind are common enough across the Irish landscape, and they cover a wide span of time and purpose. Many are the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, where a family and their livestock sheltered within a raised earthen bank or a stone wall. Others may have served as enclosures of a different character, religious or funerary, their origins harder to pin down. The 1842 Ordnance Survey, produced with considerable care and detail, captured this feature at a moment when it was still legible on the ground, or at least still present in local knowledge. That it disappeared from later mapping suggests either that the land was altered in the intervening decades, perhaps through drainage, cultivation, or construction, or that whatever slight relief once defined it was simply lost to time and agricultural pressure. Its position southeast of Toberlury holy well is worth noting; holy wells in Ireland were often focal points for older clusters of activity, and it is not unusual to find enclosures, burial grounds, or other features gathered loosely around them.