Enclosure, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope above the Sheen River valley in south-west Kerry, a circle of old stones sits in rough hill pasture, half-swallowed by grass and quietly going nowhere in particular.

The enclosure is modest by any measure, just eight metres across, its drystone wall reduced in places to a low, rubbled line no more than ninety centimetres high. Drystone construction, which uses no mortar and relies instead on the careful fitting of stones against one another, is ancient and practical in equal measure, and walls of this kind survive across the Irish landscape in varying states of collapse. What survives here is enough to read the shape of the thing, and in certain sections upright stones are still set end-on into the wall, facing roughly west-northwest and south-southeast, suggesting some original intention in their placement, though what that intention was is not recorded.

A gap on the southern side may represent an original entrance, which would be consistent with many prehistoric and early medieval enclosures in Ireland, where a break in the circuit wall provided controlled access to whatever activity took place inside. The enclosure does not stand alone. Some twenty metres to the north-east there is a hut site, the low remains of a small stone structure that would once have provided basic shelter. About fifty metres to the west, a relict field boundary, meaning a fossilised remnant of an older agricultural landscape, traces a line that no longer serves any working purpose. Together, these three features suggest a fragment of a once-functioning settlement, modest and ordinary in its ambitions, now absorbed into the hill pasture around it.

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Pete F
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