Enclosure, Gortacloghane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a south-facing slope above the Blackwater River valley in County Kerry, a small oval outline sits half-swallowed by blanket bog.
It is easy to walk past without registering what it is: a low grass-covered bank on one side, a collapsed drystone wall on the other, the whole thing measuring roughly eight and a half metres east to west and seven metres north to south. Together these two edges trace the boundary of an enclosure, the kind of modest, roughly built structure that once marked the limit of a dwelling or small farmstead on marginal upland ground.
The site sits within a wider network of relict field boundaries, and a further east-west field wall meets it at the northern edge, suggesting this was not an isolated feature but part of a organised, if modest, working landscape. Blanket bog, which forms slowly over millennia as waterlogged conditions preserve and bury organic material, has gradually consumed much of that landscape. The drystone wall, built without mortar from locally gathered stone, has collapsed to a surviving height of around 0.6 metres, but it still protrudes above the bog surface, giving the impression of something pushing back up through the ground rather than sinking into it. The bank on the opposite side is lower still, barely 0.2 metres, and has merged almost entirely with the surrounding pasture. What date the enclosure belongs to is not recorded, and the bog offers no easy answers.