Enclosure, Lissyviggeen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In a level pasture field near Lissyviggeen in County Kerry, the ground holds the faint memory of something that was once enclosed and purposeful.
What survives is barely a trace: a shallow arc of levelled bank, curving from west-northwest through north to east, measuring roughly 18 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south. The bank itself is wide, around 10 metres, but almost imperceptibly low, rising just 25 centimetres on the interior side and 15 centimetres on the exterior. To walk across it without knowing what to look for would be to notice nothing at all.
The site was first flagged as the cropmark of an enclosure, meaning it came to attention not from what could be seen at ground level but from patterns visible in aerial photography, where buried or disturbed soil reveals itself through differences in how crops or grass grow above it. An arc of bank observed during a subsequent field visit was found to correspond with a roughly circular anomaly visible on aerial imagery from 2013. Enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, often the remains of ringforts or settled farmsteads from the early medieval period, though without excavation it is difficult to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. Here, the picture is further complicated by deep disturbance from modern farming practices; the feature has been absorbed into the working field, its form largely obliterated by the same agricultural improvement that has levelled so much of the surrounding land.