Sheepfold, Tawlaght, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Farm Buildings
A structure in Tawlaght, County Kerry spent the better part of two decades officially misidentified, catalogued under the cautious bureaucratic label of "Enclosure possible" before anyone confirmed what the late nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey had already quietly recorded: it was a sheepfold, a simple enclosure used to pen and manage livestock, of the kind that once dotted upland farming landscapes across Ireland.
The 1897 to 1898 OS six-inch map marks the structure plainly for what it is, yet when the Sites and Monuments Record was compiled in 1990, and again when the Record of Monuments and Places followed in 1997, the sheepfold was entered only as a possible enclosure, the kind of cautious classification applied when a feature on the ground might suggest prehistoric or early medieval origins. Enclosures of that sort can range from ringforts to monastic precincts, and the uncertainty is understandable when a structure survives only as a low earthwork or a scatter of stone. In this case, though, the Victorian mapping evidence was there all along, waiting to be read alongside the field evidence.
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