Enclosure, Moneyflugh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Beneath a working sheepfold in a Kerry valley, an older world is still visible if you know what you are looking at.
The square pen that farmers have used for gathering sheep here in Moneyflugh was built directly over the drystone walling of a much earlier structure, its original form almost swallowed by centuries of reuse and modification. What survives beneath and around the later construction includes a basal row of large, block-like coursed slabs and a formal entrance passage on the eastern side, roughly 0.9 metres wide and 1.7 metres long, defined by two pairs of heavy upright stones. These are not the casual remnants of a collapsed field wall; the deliberate framing of the entrance suggests something that was once architecturally considered.
The site sits in a valley shaped by Coomcallee and Coomnahorna, drained by a tributary of the Owreagh river on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry. The sheepfold itself measures 12.6 metres by 9.6 metres internally, but the earlier structure it conceals may have been something altogether different in purpose. A D-shaped structure adjoins the main enclosure to the west, and its northern inner face appears to belong to an even earlier phase of building, suggesting the site has been altered and added to over a long period. Archaeologists working from the survey compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan have raised the possibility that these two earlier structures could be the remnants of a caher, a type of stone-built ringfort typically associated with early medieval Ireland, enclosed by a substantial circular or oval drystone wall. The qualification is important, though: the remains are considered too fragmentary and disturbed for any definitive classification. Old field fences are also visible nearby, adding to the impression of a landscape that has been continuously worked and reworked across many generations.
What makes Moneyflugh quietly arresting is precisely this layering, the way a mundane agricultural structure has inadvertently preserved the bones of something older. The sheepfold did not erase the earlier enclosure so much as sit down on top of it, and the heavy entrance uprights still frame a threshold that has been crossed, in one form or another, for a very long time.