Enclosure, Gullaba, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the eastern shore of Coomclogherane Lake in south-west Kerry, a small D-shaped enclosure sits in rough hill pasture at the foot of a steep west-facing slope, and it is quietly puzzling.
Its northern side is not a wall at all but a natural ridge of outcropping rock, pressed into service as a boundary. The curving drystone wall that completes the shape is low, only around 0.7 metres high and less than half a metre thick, with loose stones scattered along its base. At the southern end there is an entrance. The whole thing measures roughly 6.5 metres north to south. Inside, ferns have taken over, and somewhere beneath or among them, at the centre of the enclosure, there is what surveyors have cautiously identified as a possible boulder-burial.
A boulder-burial is a prehistoric monument type in which a large, often flat stone is supported on smaller stones or directly on the ground, typically understood to be a form of megalithic grave. The tentative classification here reflects genuine uncertainty; the feature has not been definitively confirmed as such. What adds another layer of ambiguity is the cartographic record. When the Ordnance Survey mapped this area at six-inch scale in 1895, they recorded the enclosure as rectangular, with approximate dimensions of 10 metres north to south by 8 metres east to west. The D-shape described in more recent survey work does not match that earlier outline, which raises the question of how much has shifted, collapsed, or been misread in the intervening century, and whether the two descriptions are capturing the same structure at all.