Enclosure, Moneyflugh, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Moneyflugh, Co. Kerry

At Moneyflugh in County Kerry, the most interesting thing about an ancient enclosure is that it is essentially no longer there.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded a semicircular enclosure at this spot, the kind of feature that typically represents the remains of an early medieval ringfort or a similarly ancient boundary, defined by a curved earthen bank that once enclosed a farmstead or settlement. By the time the second edition of the OS map was produced, the picture had already changed: only a low earthen bank remained, running parallel to the existing field boundary rather than describing the original semicircle. Today, no surface trace of the enclosure survives at all.

What this site illustrates, quietly and without drama, is how quickly the physical record of early settlement can be absorbed into the working landscape. Field systems expand, banks are levelled, and features that survived for perhaps a thousand years can disappear within a century or two of intensive land improvement. The Iveragh Peninsula, the broad sweep of southwest Kerry that includes the Ring of Kerry, is archaeologically dense, and surveys of the region have catalogued hundreds of such sites in varying states of survival. Moneyflugh represents the far end of that spectrum, a place where the map holds more information than the ground itself.

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Pete F
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