Enclosure, Rahoneen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
Some places are most interesting precisely because they no longer exist.
In the townland of Rahoneen in north County Kerry, there was once a circular enclosure, the kind of feature that in the Irish landscape typically signals early medieval activity, a farmstead or settlement boundary defined by an earthen bank and ditch. Today, nothing of it remains above ground.
The enclosure was recorded on the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1842 and 1897, meaning that Victorian-era cartographers considered it substantial enough to mark, and that it was still at least partially visible through the latter half of the nineteenth century. At some point after 1897, it disappeared entirely from the landscape, most likely lost to agricultural improvement, ploughing, or land clearance. It sat immediately south of another recorded site in the area, suggesting this part of Rahoneen was once a locality of some archaeological density, even if the ground now gives nothing away.