Enclosure, Kerries, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kerries, Co. Kerry

It takes a camera mounted high above the landscape to make sense of what ground-level inspection cannot.

At Kerries in County Kerry, aerial photography revealed the ghostly outline of a large oval enclosure, roughly 75 metres by 50 metres, accompanied by two smaller circular enclosures each around 30 metres in diameter. On the ground, almost none of this is legible. The land has been so thoroughly improved over the generations that the enclosures dissolve into a background noise of removed field banks, imported soil, and altered limestone. What remains are faint undulations, barely perceptible rises in the turf, and the occasional stone encountered only when the ground is probed.

The site's interpretation draws on research by Michael Connolly, whose 2008 doctoral thesis examined prehistoric settlement across the Lee Valley near Tralee. The enclosures here sit on and around a low limestone outcrop that has itself been heavily modified, partly buried under material brought in from elsewhere. Enclosures of this kind, defined earthwork boundaries that once enclosed settlements, farmsteads, or ceremonial spaces, were common features of prehistoric and early medieval Irish landscapes, though they survive in very different states of preservation from site to site. What makes Kerries particularly interesting is its apparent relationship to neighbouring complexes: a comparable grouping on Rosky Hill lies roughly 250 metres to the north-west, and another recorded complex sits approximately 180 metres to the east. Taken together, the aerial evidence suggests a spread of activity covering an area approximately 170 metres north to south and 140 metres east to west, pointing to a landscape that was once far more densely organised than its current appearance would suggest.

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