Enclosure, Killaclohane, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Killaclohane, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Killaclohane, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, there is an enclosure old enough to have been formally recorded as an archaeological monument, yet quiet enough that almost nothing about it has reached the public record.

It sits in a landscape already dense with prehistoric and early medieval remains, a part of Kerry where ringforts, standing stones, and souterrains, the stone-lined underground passages associated with early Irish settlement, turn up with some regularity in the fields and hillsides. The enclosure at Killaclohane is, for now, a shape on a map more than a story on a page.

Enclosures of this kind in Kerry are typically circular or oval earthworks defined by a bank and ditch, sometimes the remains of a ringfort used for settlement and livestock management in the early medieval period, and sometimes older still, with origins reaching back into the Bronze Age or Iron Age. The Dingle Peninsula has one of the highest concentrations of such monuments anywhere in Ireland, partly because the land was never heavily ploughed and partly because the Atlantic fringe retained older patterns of life longer than more central regions. Without more specific detail attached to this particular site, it is difficult to say whether Killaclohane preserves a substantial earthwork or only a faint trace, whether it has been excavated or simply observed from the surface. It remains, in the most literal sense, an open question.

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