Enclosure, Glanrastel, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Glanrastel, Co. Kerry

On the south-facing slope of Cummeenbaun Mountain in south-west Kerry, a collapsed drystone wall meanders across rough hill pasture in a way that seems almost reluctant to commit to a straight line.

The enclosure it traces is irregular in outline, roughly 85 metres north to south and 65 metres east to west, and what survives is mostly the lower courses of the wall, the stones protruding just above the level of the blanket bog that has crept up around them. The wall itself is narrower at the top than the base, as was typical of roughly built field or settlement boundaries, and collapses to a height of between 0.2 and 0.7 metres in places. It is easy to imagine walking past it without registering what it is.

What makes the site more than a tumbled boundary is what lies inside it. Four separate hut sites have been identified within the enclosure, along with a smaller enclosure nested within the larger one, all of them situated about 220 metres north of the Glanrastel River. The combination of a containing wall, domestic structures, and a subsidiary enclosure suggests this was once a small settlement cluster of the kind that might have supported seasonal herding or more permanent habitation in the uplands. A drystone enclosure of this kind, built without mortar and relying on the careful placement of stones for its integrity, required considerable communal effort to construct, and the scale here points to organised, repeated use of this mountain slope rather than any casual or temporary arrangement. The blanket bog that now holds the lower stones in place is itself a kind of archive, preserving what might otherwise have been robbed out or scattered entirely.

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Pete F
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