Enclosure, Lounaghan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Two upright stones, set opposite each other like sentinels on either side of a narrow gap, mark the eastern entrance to a small circular enclosure on a ridge above a tributary of the Glashievhee stream in Lounaghan, Co. Kerry.
The stones are not especially tall, one reaching 1.4 metres and the other 1.2 metres, but they are carefully placed with their long axes running east to west, framing an opening just 1.3 metres wide. It is this deliberateness, the sense of an intentional threshold in an otherwise quiet stretch of pasture, that makes the site quietly arresting.
The enclosure itself is modest: a roughly circular area measuring 12 metres east to west and just over 10 metres north to south, defined by a low bank of earth and stone about 1.9 metres wide and only 0.4 metres high. Enclosures of this kind, sometimes called ring enclosures or cashel-related features depending on their construction, were a common form of enclosed settlement or farmstead in early medieval Ireland, used to define and protect a domestic space. Wide breaks in the bank on the north-north-east to east-north-east arc and on the south to south-west suggest the structure has been disturbed or degraded over time, and a more recent field boundary running east to west has been built directly on top of the northern section of the bank, obscuring much of it. The older archaeology and the later agricultural landscape have, in effect, been folded together here, one making use of the other's materials without any apparent awareness of what lay beneath.