Enclosure, Annagh More, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On a south-west-facing slope above the valley of the Flesk River, a circular enclosure sits half-swallowed by bog, its stone walls emerging intermittently from the ground like a sentence interrupted mid-thought.
What makes it quietly strange is the way the structure both survives and disappears: on the north-east arc, an inner and outer row of upright contiguous stone slabs, each around 1.1 metres high and set close together, define a wall that is infilled with stones and clay. On the south-west side, where the bog runs deeper, the enclosing element vanishes entirely, leaving a gap that is less an entrance than an absence.
The enclosure measures roughly 23 metres in diameter, and whoever built it adapted the hillside rather than simply sitting the structure upon it. The north-west arc has been cut some 0.75 metres into the upslope, creating a level interior, which is a practical technique common to enclosed settlements where a sloping site would otherwise make the interior unusable. Within the southern sector there is a hut site, and immediately to the north-west the ground retains traces of relict field walls, the low, irregular remains of agricultural boundaries that once organised this rough pasture into workable land. A second enclosure lies about 25 metres to the south-east. Together, these features suggest not an isolated monument but a small cluster of connected activity, a fragment of a landscape in which people lived, farmed, and built enclosures whose exact age and purpose the surviving remains do not, on their own, resolve.