Enclosure, Shrone More, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Shrone More, Co. Kerry

On the north-west-facing slopes of Knocknabro in County Kerry, a low oval earthwork sits in rough pasture, largely ignored and half-swallowed by overgrowth.

At roughly thirty metres east to west and twenty metres north to south, it is not especially large, but its details reward close attention: a bank of earth and stone, best preserved at the north-east, with a small drainage channel running along its outer face and two large stones built into the bank at the east. The interior is raised at the south by over a metre, and cultivation ridges still cross it in a north-south direction, ghostly corrugations that suggest this ground was once worked rather than simply enclosed. A pile of loose stones sits at the centre, origin unclear.

Locally, the site was known as a fort, the word that generations of rural communities in Ireland applied loosely to any ancient enclosure, whether a ringfort, a defended farmstead, or something less easily categorised. Ringforts, which are the most common archaeological monument type in Ireland, were typically the enclosed farmsteads of early medieval landowners, their banks serving as much to define territory and contain livestock as to provide serious defence. Whether this enclosure at Shrone More fits neatly into that category is less certain; the cultivation ridges inside suggest a working agricultural interior, and a hut site abuts the inner face of the bank at the west, pointing to occupation of some kind. The site was recorded as a fort by the Reverend W. Ferris, who died in 1971, on land then belonging to a Patrick Duggan. That detail, a clergyman noting a field monument on a neighbour's farm, is itself a small glimpse into how local knowledge of these places was preserved and passed down before formal survey work began.

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Pete F
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