Enclosure, Parknageragh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In the townland of Parknageragh in north County Kerry, a circular enclosure once existed that has since vanished so completely that not even a slight rise in the ground remains to mark where it stood.
It exists now only as an ink mark on a set of early Ordnance Survey maps, caught in the brief window between being drawn and being gone.
The enclosure was recorded on the 1841 to 1842 Ordnance Survey mapping of the area, a period when surveyors were methodically documenting earthworks, field boundaries, and ancient features across Ireland with considerable care. By the time a later edition of the same maps was produced, the feature had already disappeared from the cartographic record entirely. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common enough form in the Irish landscape; they range from ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, to much earlier prehistoric boundaries whose original purpose is harder to read. What this particular enclosure was used for, who built it, and when it fell out of use is not known. What can be said is that it lay to the east of another recorded site in the same townland, placing it within a landscape that clearly held more human activity over the centuries than the bare fields there today might suggest.