Enclosure, Uragh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Uragh, Co. Kerry

On an east-facing slope above Lough Inchiquin in south-west Kerry, a large enclosure sits half-swallowed by bog, its drystone walls still legible beneath the surface of the hill pasture.

What makes it quietly odd is its scale and its irregularity. Measuring roughly 95 metres on its longest axis and about 65 metres across, it is not a small domestic enclosure but something more ambitious, its walls meandering across the uneven ground rather than following any tidy geometric logic. Many of the stones remain upright, set at right angles to the line of the wall, which gives the structure a particular quality, less like a ruin and more like something interrupted.

The enclosure belongs to a pattern of settlement that once extended across hillsides now considered marginal. An enclosure of this kind, defined by a collapsed drystone boundary wall, would have served to demarcate land, shelter livestock, or gather a small farming community within a defensible or organised perimeter. What survives here is that perimeter plus evidence of the people who lived inside it. Four hut sites cluster within the south-eastern portion of the enclosure, and two further hut sites sit just outside it, abutting the external face of the wall at the south-east. A hut site in this context typically means the low, spread remains of a circular or sub-circular stone structure, the footprint of a building long since reduced to a slight earthwork or scatter of stones. The grouping of habitation inside and immediately outside the wall suggests a community that grew around or beyond its original boundary, rather than a single planned settlement.

The site lies about 35 metres south of a river, close enough that water would not have been a concern for whoever lived here. The bog that has since crept over the lower courses of the wall tells its own story about how the landscape has shifted around these stones in the centuries since they were last in use.

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