Enclosure, Sliss, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Sliss, Co. Kerry

In the corner of a pastoral field in Sliss, north Kerry, a large earthen enclosure sits quietly misread by the landscape around it.

The southern and western banks that once completed its circuit have been ploughed away and replaced by modern field boundaries, so what you are actually looking at today is only a partial ring, the surviving arc curving from north through east to south-east. Without knowing what to look for, it would be easy to take the remaining bank for nothing more than a particularly substantial field margin.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1841 to 1842 record the site as "Kyle burial ground", and by 1914 it had already been noted as disused. The word "kyle" derives from the Irish "coill", meaning a wood or grove, which hints at an older character to the place that the maps alone cannot fully explain. What remains of the earthen bank stands around 1.3 metres above the surrounding land, with a base width of roughly 6 metres, making it a substantial construction in its day. The interior measures approximately 51 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, a considerable enclosed space. Three gaps interrupt the surviving bank, two on the northern side and one to the south-east, measuring 9 metres, 4 metres, and 4 metres wide respectively; whether these are original entrances or later breaches is not recorded. In the eastern portion of the interior, a large stone slab, possibly a grave marker, lies among other scattered stones. Immediately to the north-west of the enclosure lies a reputed holy well, a pairing of burial ground and holy well that is far from unusual in the Irish landscape and often points to the long use of a site as a place of local religious significance, layered across different periods.

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