Enclosure, Inchicloon, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a west-facing slope above the valley of the Dromoghty River in south-west Kerry, a rough circle of upright stones pushes through the surface of a bog, marking the outline of an enclosure that the landscape has been quietly swallowing for centuries.
The structure is modest in scale, measuring just over ten and a half metres across in both directions, its stones standing roughly half a metre above the peat. What makes it quietly arresting is precisely its incompleteness: the eastern to north-western arc is reasonably legible, but the northern and north-eastern sections have all but disappeared, with only a single outlying stone at the north-north-east to suggest that a full circuit once existed.
The enclosure sits within a wider pattern of relict field boundaries, the ghostly geometry of a farming landscape that was abandoned long ago and subsequently buried under bog. A relict field wall survives approximately two hundred metres to the north-north-east, hinting that this was once an organised, working terrain rather than isolated wilderness. Stone enclosures of this kind, built to define a bounded space in the landscape, appear across Ireland in various forms and periods; without excavation it is difficult to say precisely when this one was in use or what purpose it served, whether agricultural, domestic, or otherwise. The bog that now surrounds it has preserved what remains, even as it has obscured the rest.