Enclosure, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kealduff, Co. Kerry

In the pastureland of Kealduff, on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, there is an archaeological site that no longer exists in any physical sense, yet still appears on maps.

Both editions of the Ordnance Survey recorded a subcircular enclosure here, one of the rounded or roughly circular earthwork boundaries, typically of early medieval date in Ireland, that once defined a farmstead, a place of refuge, or a sacred space. No trace of it survives on the ground today, and nobody living has any memory of it standing. The grass grows over whatever it once was, and the land is given over to grazing.

There is something quietly strange about a site that persists only in cartographic memory. The OS surveyors, working through the nineteenth century, recorded what they saw or what local knowledge told them was there; the mark was repeated on the second edition, which is its own kind of confirmation. A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan included it in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, cataloguing it as site number 820 among the many enclosures, ringforts, and earthworks that once punctuated this landscape. That it was already gone by the time of the survey, with no living memory of its form or condition, suggests it had been reduced, levelled, or absorbed into the agricultural fabric of the townland well before the twentieth century was out.

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