Enclosure, Sheans, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Sheans, Co. Kerry

On a north-facing slope in improved pasture near Sheans in County Kerry, there is an oval patch of ground that does not quite behave like its surroundings.

Its interior is level, covered in mature hay, and just different enough from the fields around it to catch the eye of anyone looking at aerial photography, which is precisely how it was identified. Satellite imagery from 2010 and 2015 both record it as an area of differential growth, the kind of subtle variation in vegetation colour and density that often points to something buried or altered beneath the soil.

The feature is tentatively classified as a possible enclosure, an umbrella term in Irish field archaeology for a defined area set apart from its surroundings by a bank, ditch, or scarp. Here, the defining element is a scarp, a slope or step in the ground surface caused by past human activity, running roughly from east-southeast around through south to west-northwest. It is most pronounced along its southwestern to western arc, where it reaches about 1.6 metres in height across a width of roughly 10 metres. The overall oval measures approximately 24 metres east to west and 16 metres north to south. Parts of the scarp have been levelled over time, though they remain traceable, and a deep land drain cuts across one section, with a densely overgrown field boundary obscuring another stretch entirely. An adjacent field to the north holds a poorly drained depression colonised by yellow flag iris, a plant that frequently signals wet, low-lying ground. What the enclosure originally was, and when it was made, remains genuinely unknown; nothing on historic maps offers a clue.

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Pete F
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