Enclosure, Trienearagh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
In the townland of Trienearagh in north County Kerry, a large circular enclosure sits so close to nothing that it barely registers as a feature of the land at all.
Roughly 71 metres across and almost entirely levelled, it survives as little more than a faint trace in a field sloping away to the north-east, the kind of thing that rewards a careful eye but defeats a casual glance. Enclosures of this type, sometimes called ringforts, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically consisting of a raised earthen bank surrounding a domestic or farming area, but this one has been so thoroughly reduced that its original form can really only be inferred.
What makes its cartographic history quietly interesting is the gap in the record. The enclosure does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of the area, suggesting it was either too degraded to be recorded or simply overlooked by the original surveyors. By the time the 1915 revision was made, however, it had been noted and marked, which places its documented existence within a narrow window of early twentieth-century mapping. Whether it had been partially visible for centuries before that, slowly disappearing under the pressure of agriculture, is not something the surviving evidence makes clear. The survey work of C. Toal, published in 1995 as part of the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, brought the site back into any kind of formal attention.