Enclosure, Gortagass, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortagass, Co. Kerry

On a low knoll above Kenmare Bay in south-west Kerry, something has disappeared so completely that only an old map betrays it ever existed.

A square enclosure, roughly ten metres by ten metres, was recorded at this spot on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1895, but today the site shows no trace at ground level. A house and its gardens now occupy the area, and whatever earthwork or boundary once defined the enclosure has been absorbed entirely into the domestic landscape.

Enclosures of this kind are common enough in the Irish archaeological record, ranging from early medieval ringforts to smaller stock enclosures and field boundaries of uncertain date. What makes this one quietly interesting is less what it is than what it has become: a site known only through cartographic evidence, its physical form erased while its outline persists on paper. The 1895 Ordnance Survey mapping was meticulous by the standards of the day, and the surveyors clearly recorded something they considered worth noting, a defined, roughly square boundary on raised ground with a clear aspect over the bay to the south-west. Whether it was agricultural, defensive, or associated with earlier settlement is now difficult to say, since nothing survives to examine.

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Pete F
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