Enclosure, Kerries, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kerries, Co. Kerry

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or visible earthworks.

This one, in the Kerries area of County Kerry, is almost perversely reluctant to be found. What aerial photography revealed as a large oval enclosure, roughly 75 metres by 50 metres, with two smaller satellite enclosures each around 30 metres in diameter, is at ground level little more than a series of faint undulations in improved farmland. The features survive as ghost-like traces rather than legible structures, the kind of thing that rewards patient looking and rewards it slowly.

The site sits on and around a low limestone outcrop that has itself been substantially altered over time, partially buried under imported soil, its natural profile reshaped by generations of agricultural activity. The surrounding land has been heavily improved, and old field banks have been removed, leaving behind a confusing palimpsest in which the genuinely ancient is tangled up with the merely historical. Probing, however, has revealed stone within some of the banks, suggesting that what lies here was once a substantial complex of enclosures and field boundaries. Michael Connolly, in his 2008 doctoral thesis on the prehistoric settlement of the Lee Valley, Tralee, placed the site within a broader landscape of similar prehistoric activity: a comparable complex sits on Rosky Hill around 250 metres to the north-west, and another recorded grouping lies roughly 180 metres to the east. Taken together, the aerial photographic evidence spreads across an area of approximately 170 metres north to south and 140 metres east to west, suggesting that what now reads as a faint smudge in the fields was once a meaningful node in an organised prehistoric landscape.

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Pete F
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