Enclosure, Moyleglass, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Moyleglass, Co. Kerry

At Moyleglass in County Kerry, a circle of stone footings sits quietly in the landscape, small enough that a person could almost step across its interior in a single pace.

The foundations measure just 1.35 metres by 1.2 metres internally, with the stone footings averaging around half a metre in width, meaning the walls themselves were, in some respects, more substantial than the space they enclosed. That proportion alone raises questions. Whatever this structure once held or sheltered, it was built with some care.

The site is recorded as a small enclosure, a broad category in Irish archaeology that can cover anything from a domestic outbuilding to a structure associated with early ecclesiastical or agricultural activity. Enclosures of this kind, typically defined by a circular or sub-circular wall or bank, appear throughout Kerry and the wider Iveragh peninsula, a landscape that was surveyed in detail by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, whose work was published by Cork University Press in 1996. The Iveragh peninsula is one of the more archaeologically dense parts of Ireland, its Atlantic terrain having preserved features that elsewhere were lost to later development. A structure this compact might once have served as a small animal pen, a storage cell, or something whose original purpose has simply not survived in the record.

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