Enclosure, Shronebirrane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the eastern slope of Tooth Mountain in south-west Kerry, a rough triangle of collapsed drystone walling sits half-submerged in blanket bog, almost entirely unremarked.
Measuring roughly five metres east to west and three metres north to south, it is the kind of structure that could be walked past without a second glance, its lower course of slabs protruding just enough above the peat to suggest something deliberate beneath the rubble.
This small enclosure belongs to a wider network of relict field boundaries that spread across the surrounding hill pasture, the ghostly outline of an agricultural landscape that was once organised and worked, and has since been reclaimed by the bog. Drystone enclosures of this kind, built without mortar from whatever stone lay to hand, were used across Ireland for purposes ranging from animal management to cultivation plots, sometimes associated with seasonal farming activity on higher ground. The wall here, where it survives at all, stands only around sixty centimetres high and is almost totally collapsed; the interior slopes down to the east and is largely strewn with the same rubble that was once its boundary. A further stretch of relict walling runs north to south to the west of the enclosure, a remnant of the broader field system of which this structure formed one small part. What exactly the enclosure was used for, and when it fell out of use, the ground does not readily say.