Pound, Lauragh, Co. Kerry

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Pound, Lauragh, Co. Kerry

On a west-facing slope above Glanmore Lake in County Kerry, a small square enclosure sits in gorse-covered ground without leaving any trace you could actually stand in and recognise.

No walls rise above the earth, no obvious outline presents itself to a visitor passing through. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic fact.

A pound was a place where stray or impounded livestock were held, typically until their owner paid a fine or fee to reclaim them. They were practical, municipal structures, common enough in rural Ireland but rarely celebrated, and most have quietly vanished. This one, measuring roughly ten metres by ten metres, was clearly established enough to be named and mapped twice: once on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1846, and again on the OS Fair Plan, a separate series of large-scale town and village surveys produced around the same period. A laneway running from the enclosure down to the road suggests it was a functioning part of the local landscape rather than a casual pen, something with a degree of permanence built into it. That both surveys independently record the name "pound" at this location in the Lauragh area indicates it was recognised and used within living memory of those mid-nineteenth-century surveyors.

What remains now is largely a matter of knowing where to look and adjusting expectations accordingly. The gorse-covered slope above Glanmore Lake holds no obvious monument, and the enclosure is not visible at ground level. The laneway to the road may still be traceable.

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Pete F
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