Enclosure, Rathscannel, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathscannel, Co. Kerry

At Rathscannel in County Kerry, there is a circular enclosure that exists now only on paper.

No bank, no ditch, no ring of stone marks the ground. The only evidence that something was ever there comes from two Ordnance Survey maps, drawn in 1841 to 1842 and again in 1898, both of which record a circular form that has since vanished entirely from the landscape.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, ranging from the earthen raths of the early medieval period to later field boundaries that borrowed similar shapes from older traditions. Whether this particular example at Rathscannel belonged to any of those categories is impossible to say with confidence, since the cartographic record offers an outline but no further detail. What the two maps do confirm is that something was still visible, or at least remembered, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, and that in the decades following it disappeared, ploughed out, built over, or simply worn away by time and weather.

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Pete F
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