Enclosure, Nunstown, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Nunstown, Co. Kerry

There is a field in Nunstown, County Kerry, that holds something beneath its surface, or possibly above it, though you would never know by walking across it.

The ground is level pasture, unremarkable to any visitor, and nothing of the site is visible at ground level. Its existence as an archaeological feature rests entirely on a single aerial photograph, taken in 1977, in which a curved cropmark traces an arc from west to south-east. That arc suggests the outline of a roughly circular enclosure, approximately 45 metres in diameter, of the kind that would once have defined a farmstead, a ritual space, or a boundary of some social significance.

Circular enclosures of this type are common in the Irish landscape, though most survive at least partially as earthworks. This one, if it exists at all in the way the aerial evidence implies, has been reduced to nothing the eye can catch from the ground. What the 1977 photograph captured was likely a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried ditches or banks influence the growth of grass or grain above them, producing lines and curves visible only from altitude, and often only in particular seasons or light conditions. Close to the proposed enclosure, two burnt spreads have been recorded, one lying roughly 50 metres to the north-east and another approximately 30 metres to the north-north-west. Such burnt spreads are frequently associated with fulachta fiadh, the remains of ancient cooking or industrial sites where water was heated using fire-cracked stone, though whether these particular spreads relate to the enclosure, or simply share the same general landscape, is not recorded.

The site sits in ordinary farmland and offers nothing visible to a visitor making the journey specifically to see it. Its interest is less as a place to stand than as a reminder of how much of the Irish archaeological record exists only in archives and at altitude, pieced together from moments when the light was right and a camera happened to be pointing downward.

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Pete F
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