Enclosure, Lackaroe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a south-facing slope above the Sheen River valley in south-west Kerry, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly in pasture, its drystone perimeter only partially intact but still legible enough to suggest the care that went into its original construction.
What makes it quietly unusual is the engineering involved in simply levelling the ground: the southern portion of the interior was built up, while the northern portion was cut back into the hillside, creating a flat platform roughly 26 metres across. Someone went to considerable trouble to make this space usable, and the surviving entrance passage, about a metre wide and lined with upright stones still standing close to a metre tall, gives a sense of deliberate, considered design.
The wall itself preserves a detail worth pausing over. Along certain stretches, large upright stones were set with their long axes running at right angles to the wall's course, a technique that helps bind the structure and resist the outward pressure of the fill. This kind of drystone construction, built without mortar and relying instead on the careful placement of stone, is found across early medieval and prehistoric Ireland, though enclosures of this type are often difficult to date precisely without excavation. The wall has been absorbed into the later field boundary system over time, which partly explains its fragmentary state; centuries of agricultural use have a tendency to cannibalise older stonework for new purposes. Twenty metres to the north-west, a multiple-stone circle has been recorded separately, and the proximity of the two monuments suggests this terrace above the Sheen valley may have held some significance across more than one period of prehistoric activity.