Enclosure, Lerrig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lerrig, Co. Kerry

In the townland of Lerrig in north County Kerry sits a circular enclosure that archaeologists have never been permitted to properly examine.

That detail alone gives it a quiet peculiarity: it is a site that exists on maps, that has been noted and catalogued, yet remains, in any meaningful documentary sense, unrecorded at ground level.

The enclosure first appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, part of the great Victorian-era effort to chart the Irish landscape in exhaustive detail. By the time the revised edition was published in 1898, the feature appears to have been partially absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape, with fieldbanks enclosing it on the western, southern, and eastern sides. Circular enclosures of this kind are relatively common across Munster and may date from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. They are sometimes the remains of a rath or ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built from earthen banks, which served as a domestic settlement and a means of protecting livestock. Whether that is the case here remains unconfirmed, because when researchers from the North Kerry Archaeological Survey attempted to visit and record the site in the early 1990s, permission to access the land was refused. The site was documented at a distance, from maps alone, and that is where the record stops.

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