Enclosure, Kerries, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a low limestone reef near Tralee, a prehistoric enclosure sits almost invisibly within a landscape that has been largely erased around it.
More than a hundred acres of surrounding land have been stripped of their field banks, ploughed, and re-seeded for strip grazing, leaving the monument isolated in a way its builders almost certainly never intended. What remains is a sub-circular stone bank, grass-covered in places, that follows the natural contours of a waulsortian mudmound, a type of ancient limestone reef formed from the accumulated remains of marine organisms and later exposed by erosion. The eastern side of the enclosure has no bank at all; the reef simply drops away sharply, and that edge of the cliff appears to have served as the boundary itself.
The site sits on two such mudmounds separated by a shallow gully, and its positioning seems carefully considered. Michael Connolly, whose 2008 doctoral thesis at University College Cork examined prehistoric settlement patterns in the Lee Valley near Tralee, observed that the slope of the more northerly reef, where the principal structure stands, gives a direct line of sight down to the second, more southerly site thirty metres away. The enclosure designated Structure A measures roughly 24.8 metres north to south and 25.9 metres from its western bank to the reef edge in the east. The enclosing bank averages two metres wide at its base and about half a metre high, with outcrops of natural bedrock incorporated into its length rather than cleared away. At the centre of the enclosed area stand two small rubble cairns, measuring 1.6 and 2.3 metres in diameter respectively and surviving to a height of around 0.55 metres. Their purpose is not recorded, but small cairns within prehistoric enclosures are often associated with burial or with marking significant ground. Several further cairns and low stone field banks survive elsewhere within the complex.
What makes the setting particularly striking is its orientation. The site is screened to the west by higher ground but opens onto long views in almost every other direction: the Stacks Mountains to the north-east, Sliabh Mis ranging across the southern horizon, and a clear prospect of Knockanush Hill and the pass cutting between it and the ridge running westward from the Stacks. Whether the builders were drawn here by geology, by that commanding outlook, or by some combination of the two is a question the landscape raises without quite answering.