Enclosure, Killabunane, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Killabunane, Co. Kerry

On a ridge to the east of Derrynacaheragh Hill in south-west Kerry, a rough circle of collapsed drystone walling sits in a hollow near the northern edge of a col, the low saddle of ground between two higher points.

It measures roughly thirteen metres north to south and twelve east to west, the wall surviving to about half a metre in height and sixty-five centimetres thick, best preserved along its southern and northern faces. What makes it quietly arresting is not the enclosure itself but its context: it sits within a network of pre-bog field boundaries, the ghost geometry of a landscape that was once cleared, divided, and worked, long before the blanket bog crept over and buried the evidence.

Pre-bog field systems are among the more humbling things Irish uplands preserve. Peat growth can seal and protect boundaries, banks, and associated structures for millennia, and what emerges when erosion or cutting reveals them is often a coherent agricultural landscape from the Bronze Age or earlier. The Killabunane enclosure, a roughly circular area defined by drystone walling, is the kind of structure typically associated with small farmsteads or stock management in prehistoric upland settings. About seven metres to the north sits a hut site, a separate but almost certainly related structure, suggesting this was not an isolated feature but part of a small working complex, modest in scale and now reduced to low ruined walls in rough hill pasture.

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Pete F
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