Enclosure, Macha Ghrianáin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Macha Ghrianáin, Co. Kerry

On a north-facing slope in the Kerry uplands, wedged between two remote loughs, there is a small stone enclosure that does not appear on any Ordnance Survey map.

That absence is itself telling. The site sits on the ridge dividing Cloonaghlin and Iskanamacteery Loughs, in the townland of Macha Ghrianáin on the Iveragh Peninsula, and it has quietly persisted in the landscape without the cartographic acknowledgement that most archaeological features eventually receive.

The enclosure is modest in scale and condition. A bank of stone and earth, averaging roughly half a metre high and a metre wide, traces an oval roughly thirteen metres north to south and eleven metres east to west. Inside, a circular hut survives in a similarly reduced state, its internal dimensions just three metres by two metres, its stone walls still standing to about eighty centimetres in places and nearly a metre and a quarter wide. These proportions, a thick wall relative to a compact interior, are typical of early medieval or later pastoral shelters in the Irish uplands, where stone was plentiful and insulation mattered more than floor space. Both the hut and the outer enclosing bank have suffered enough collapse that the position of the entrance in each is no longer identifiable. The site was documented by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan as part of their survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, and it remains one of the quieter entries in that record, a structure more defined by what has been lost than by what can still be read.

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