Enclosure, Fustane, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Fustane, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slope of Mangerton Mountain, a circle of eleven stones barely breaks the surface of the bog.

The ring is modest, just 5.3 metres across, and its stones, each roughly a metre long and less than half a metre tall, sit contiguous with one another, edge to edge, as though pressed into formation by something long since vanished. What makes the arrangement quietly arresting is precisely what surrounds it: rough, peaty pasture that has slowly swallowed the landscape over centuries, leaving only these stone tops visible above the bog surface.

An enclosure of this kind, a low-walled circular area defined by set stones, represents a form of boundary-making common to prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, though the exact date of this particular structure is not recorded. What is clear is that it did not exist in isolation. About 60 metres to the east-south-east, a pre-bog field boundary survives, a remnant of a farming landscape that predates the formation of the surrounding bog itself. Roughly 70 metres to the south-west lies a cairn, a mound of stones that may mark a burial. Together, these three features suggest that this stretch of hillside was once a worked and inhabited place, organised and divided in ways that the encroaching peat has since obscured almost entirely.

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Pete F
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