Hilltop enclosure, Ash-Hill, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the north-facing slope of Ash-Hill in County Kerry, a large sub-circular enclosure sits quietly at sixty metres above sea level, its earthen bank so worn and intermittently visible that most people passing through the surrounding farmland would have no idea it was there at all.
Measuring roughly 158 metres on its longest axis and 129 metres across, it is a substantial feature, comparable in scale to some of the largest enclosed sites in Munster, yet it has been so thoroughly eroded and partially levelled that only fragments of the original bank survive above ground. Its existence was not noted at all until a black and white aerial photograph picked it out in 1995.
The enclosure belongs to the broader prehistoric settlement landscape of the Lee Valley around Tralee, as examined by Michael Connolly in his 2008 doctoral thesis at University College Cork. Connolly's work placed the site within a landscape perspective, considering how such enclosures, earthwork boundaries typically formed by a raised bank and sometimes an accompanying ditch, related to the surrounding terrain and to other prehistoric features in the valley between Ballycarty and Castleisland. The bank is best preserved along the northern arc, where it stands 0.57 metres in external height and stretches to 9.5 metres in width, though its internal height is only around 0.20 metres. Elsewhere the width runs between eight and ten metres where it can be traced at all, particularly to the west, north-west, and south. Field amalgamation and land reclamation carried out since the aerial photograph was taken have made matters worse, and former field boundaries that once cut across the interior have themselves since been removed, leaving nothing identifiable internally.
The site's position on the slope of Ash-Hill does give it a commanding outlook over the Stacks Mountains to the north and along the Lee Valley in both directions, which may well have been a factor in its original siting. Whether that prominence was symbolic, defensive, or simply practical is, given the absence of any surviving internal features, a question the landscape can no longer answer on its own.