Enclosure, Lettermoneel, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Lettermoneel, Co. Kerry

On the lower northern slopes of Knocknafreaghane, on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, there is a site that may no longer exist at all.

A small circular enclosure once appeared on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, plotted in rough grazing pasture, but land clearance work is thought to have removed whatever physical trace remained on the ground. What survives, essentially, is a cartographic ghost.

The enclosure's modest dimensions suggest it belonged to a category known as a fionnán enclosure, a type of small, low-status circular earthwork associated with secular agricultural use, likely for managing livestock or demarcating a patch of ground, rather than the more substantial ringforts that dominate the Irish early medieval landscape. Sites of this kind rarely attract attention precisely because they were never monumental to begin with, built to serve practical needs and easily erased by later farming. The detail comes from the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, a systematic catalogue of a landscape that contains far more archaeology than its surface, at first glance, reveals.

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Pete F
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