Enclosure, Lerrig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lerrig, Co. Kerry

In the fields of Lerrig, in north County Kerry, there is an archaeological site that exists almost entirely on paper.

A circular enclosure, the kind of feature that often turns out to be the remains of a ringfort or an early medieval farmstead boundary, was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1897, and was still visible enough in 1977 to show up in aerial photographs taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland. Today, no surface trace survives. The field has, in effect, swallowed it.

Circular enclosures of this type are common across the Irish landscape, and their disappearance is not unusual. Decades of deep ploughing, land improvement schemes, and drainage works have erased thousands of such features from the ground while leaving them preserved, ghostlike, in older cartographic records. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is the precision with which its vanishing can be tracked. Between the mid-nineteenth century mapping and the late twentieth century aerial photograph, the enclosure was still legible. Sometime after 1977, the last surface evidence was lost. C. Toal's North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, recorded its existence and noted its position south-west of another nearby monument, but by that point the site was already defined more by its absence than by anything a visitor could observe on the ground.

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