Platform, Maulagowna, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On a hillside at Maulagowna in County Kerry, a small rectangular earthen platform sits quietly in the landscape, its purpose unrecorded and its origins unresolved.
It is not a ringfort, not a field boundary, not a dwelling in any obvious sense; it is simply a raised rectangle of earth, precisely cut, surrounded by a shallow ditch, and sitting alone in the uplands.
The platform measures 6.75 metres east to west by 3.4 metres, and is enclosed by an earth-cut ditch running approximately 0.35 metres below both the platform surface and the surrounding ground level, with the platform itself rising roughly 0.9 metres above that ditch. It sits around ten metres to the north-west of a hut site, which suggests some functional relationship between the two features, though what that relationship was remains unclear. Platforms of this kind can appear in a range of early medieval and later rural contexts, sometimes associated with storage, sometimes with animal management, sometimes with activities that leave no trace in the ground at all. Without excavation, the date of this one is unknown.