Enclosure, Garryard, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Garryard, Co. Kerry

In a field just west of the Galey river in north Kerry, a low arc of earthwork is almost all that remains of what was once a circular enclosure.

Enclosures of this kind, sometimes referred to as ringforts, were among the most common forms of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as enclosed farmsteads surrounded by an earthen bank and ditch. What makes this one quietly notable is precisely its diminishment: where a complete example might present a full circuit of bank enclosing a recognisable interior space, here only a single curving segment survives, running for roughly twenty metres along the southern to south-eastern arc.

The enclosure appears on the 1939 Ordnance Survey map, which suggests it was still legible as a feature within living memory, even if already much reduced. The surviving bank measures around eight metres wide and rises to approximately 1.8 metres on its external face, though only about one metre when viewed from inside. That asymmetry in height is typical of earthwork construction, where material was dug from an interior ditch and piled outward to form the bank, leaving the inner face lower than the outer. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, records the site as heavily levelled, and the figures suggest that what remains is a substantial piece of earth that has nonetheless lost any clear sense of the enclosure it once completed.

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