Enclosure, Drom, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the north-west-facing slopes of Killeen Mountain in County Kerry, a low drystone wall encloses a rectangular patch of rough hill pasture.
That alone would be unremarkable. What makes this particular enclosure quietly arresting is the layering of uses compressed into a single modest space: a sheep fold recorded on nineteenth-century maps, the faint corrugations of old cultivation ridges running across the interior, and a large outcropping stone at the north-west corner that local tradition identifies as a mass-rock.
A mass-rock is exactly what it sounds like, a flat or prominent stone used as an improvised altar during the Penal era, when Catholic worship was suppressed under British law and priests conducted Mass outdoors, away from settled ground and easier to scatter from if soldiers approached. The stone at this enclosure carries that designation locally, suggesting the site held religious significance well before or alongside its agricultural use. The 1846 Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels the enclosure a Sheep Fold and gives its dimensions as roughly 40 metres north-west to south-east by 15 metres, noticeably larger than the structure as it survives today, where the walls measure approximately 27 metres by 20 metres. By the time of the 1894 to 1895 OS revision, the recorded dimensions had already contracted to something closer to the present remains, indicating either genuine reduction through collapse and robbing of stone, or simply differences in how surveyors drew the boundary. The partially collapsed drystone wall, now standing to roughly 0.7 metres in height and 0.25 metres thick, follows the enclosure on most sides, while the north-west corner relies on natural outcropping rock rather than built stone.
The cultivation ridges running through the interior add another layer of complexity. Their presence suggests the space was not used solely for livestock; at some point the ground inside was worked, most likely for potatoes or another subsistence crop. Whether that cultivation predated or followed the enclosure's use as a fold is not clear, but the ridges and the mass-rock together push the site well beyond the category of ordinary agricultural remains.