House - indeterminate date, Annagap, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
On a north-east facing slope just under a kilometre north of Anascaul in County Kerry, a large subrectangular enclosure holds the ghostly outlines of what was once a small settlement.
Known as Lisnakilla, or Lios na Cille in Irish, the site sits roughly 200 metres west of the Owenascaul river, and what survives above ground amounts to little more than low stony banks, the reduced walls of at least four rectangular structures that were once, most likely, houses. The date of their construction remains unknown, which is itself part of what makes the place quietly unsettling; the people who built and occupied them have left almost nothing that could anchor them to a particular century.
The enclosure is divided internally by walls running across it, and several of the rectangular structures abut these dividing walls in ways that suggest deliberate planning. Two of them sit against the southern face of the northern dividing wall at its western end, a third is pressed against the northern face of the middle dividing wall, and a fourth occupies the north-east corner of the enclosure. The interior of the site is also crossed by east-west cultivation ridges, the corrugated traces of former farmland, and it is possible that the dividing walls and the structures themselves belong to this same agricultural phase rather than to an earlier occupation. Complicating things further, a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind often associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage or refuge, was reportedly discovered years ago in the south-west sector of the enclosure. No trace of it is visible today, and knowledge of its existence comes only from local memory. The broader site description draws on J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, which remains a key reference for this densely layered landscape.
The low banks that mark the house sites are easy to miss, and the absence of any obvious entrance or interpretation means the enclosure rewards patience and a reasonable eye for earthworks. The cultivation ridges covering much of the interior give the ground a rippled texture underfoot, and the relationship between those ridges and the older structural remains is something the site itself poses as a question rather than answers.