Enclosure, Scrahanagnave, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
When a cluster of enclosures shows up on an aerial photograph, the instinct is to reach for the familiar vocabulary of ringforts and field systems.
The six low enclosures at Scrahanagnave, on boggy ground beside the Small River in County Kerry, turn out to have a far more domestic explanation, and one that has largely passed out of living memory elsewhere. The local landowner knows them not by any archaeological term but as "haggarts", and what he remembers happening inside them is the making of cocks of fionnán, a long, whitish moorgrass that once had practical uses on upland farms.
The enclosures came to wider attention when they were identified on a 1973 aerial photograph, and the site was visited in person in May 2005. By that point the area was rough grazing, with mature conifer plantations pressing in from the west, north, and south. The landowner recalled cutting and stacking fionnán with his father at these very spots, and he could point to similar enclosures used by neighbours on both sides of the river, suggesting the practice was once common along this stretch of ground. The haggarts, then, are not ancient monuments in any conventional sense but traces of a fairly recent agricultural habit, the kind of vernacular land use that rarely gets recorded because it seems too ordinary to bother with, and then abruptly vanishes when the practice stops. At least one of the enclosures is now entirely swallowed by the conifer forest and could not be inspected at all during the 2005 visit.