Enclosure, Lehid, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a level shelf of cut-away bog above Kenmare Bay, a circle of collapsed stone sits so quietly in the rough hill pasture that it reads, at first glance, as little more than a low ripple in the ground.
Look closer and the logic of it becomes apparent: a wall roughly a metre thick and still standing to about half a metre in places, built from an inner and outer row of contiguous stone slabs packed with rubble between them. The entrance, a narrow gap of just 0.8 metres, faces north-north-west and is flanked by a pair of upright slabs, each serving as a jamb stone. The southern part of the interior floor sits slightly higher than the ground outside, a subtle but deliberate feature that would have helped with drainage in a landscape already saturated with bog.
Circular stone enclosures of this kind are a familiar presence across the Irish uplands, though their precise functions varied considerably. Some served as farmsteads or animal enclosures, others had ceremonial or funerary associations. At Lehid, the evidence around the structure adds a layer of complexity. A relict field wall, the remnant of an old agricultural boundary, runs up to meet the enclosure from the north-west, suggesting this was once part of a wider managed landscape rather than an isolated structure. About 40 metres to the south lies a burnt spread, a patch of scorched or fire-affected material of the kind often associated with prehistoric cooking sites known as fulachta fiadh, where water was heated using fire-cracked stones. Whether the enclosure and the burnt spread belong to the same period of activity is not certain, but their proximity on the same terrace of bog hints at a place that was, at some point, considerably busier than it now appears.
The large stones in the lower courses of the wall protrude above the shallow bog surface, which means the structure is at least partially visible even from a distance, though the grass cover over much of the collapsed material makes it easy to underestimate the scale of what is there. The diameter of 13.6 metres is substantial, comparable to many enclosures that elsewhere in Kerry have been interpreted as early medieval or prehistoric farmsteads.