Enclosure, Lacka More, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
At Lacka More in north County Kerry, there is a site that exists almost entirely on paper.
A circular enclosure, the kind of feature that typically signals early medieval settlement, a ringfort or enclosed farmstead, once occupied this ground. Today, nothing of it remains above the surface. It has been levelled completely, leaving no earthwork, no trace of a bank or ditch, no visible sign that anything was ever here.
What we know comes from two editions of the Ordnance Survey maps. The earlier survey, carried out in 1841 and 1842, recorded a clear circular enclosure at this location. By the time the revised edition was produced in 1898, the outline was already less distinct, and two fieldbanks had been cut directly through the site. The enclosure was losing its definition, absorbed gradually into the working agricultural landscape around it. At some point after that second mapping, whatever remained was levelled entirely. Circular enclosures of this type are among the most common early medieval monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands once scattered across the country, and Lacka More follows a familiar pattern: gradual erasure through land improvement, the boundary banks broken up and spread, the interior levelled to make more manageable ground for farming.
There is nothing for a visitor to see here in any conventional sense. The site's interest lies precisely in that absence, in the gap between two OS map editions where something that had stood for perhaps a thousand years quietly disappeared into the field system around it.