Enclosure, Poulagower, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Poulagower, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope in Poulagower, County Kerry, a near-rectangular wall encloses a patch of rough ground that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

The enclosure measures roughly 32 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, its drystone boundary wall, built without mortar by laying stone upon stone, still standing to around 1.2 metres in places despite partial collapse. Loose stones and small boulders litter the overgrown interior, and beneath the grass and scrub there are faint traces of cultivation ridges, the low parallel earthworks left by lazy-bed farming, where soil was mounded up in strips to improve drainage and yield on marginal land.

The site reads like a small self-contained settlement. A hut site abuts the interior of the east wall, suggesting that whoever worked this ground also sheltered within it. A narrow entrance gap of just 0.8 metres breaks the west wall, wide enough for a person but not for cattle to pass easily, which may say something about how the space was managed and secured. A stream runs along the outside of the north wall, a detail that would have mattered enormously to anyone living here, providing reliable water close at hand without compromising the enclosure itself. A second hut site lies approximately 30 metres to the west-southwest, hinting that this was not an isolated structure but part of a small cluster of activity spread across this sheltered break in the slope. Together, the enclosure, the cultivation evidence, and the nearby hut sites point to a community of small-scale farming and habitation, though without excavation the period remains open.

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Pete F
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