Enclosure, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cummeenduvasig, Co. Kerry

Somebody, at some point, went to considerable trouble to level the ground before building here.

On a south-east-facing slope above the valley of the Owbaun River in south-west Kerry, an ancient circular enclosure sits in rough peaty pasture, its interior carefully engineered to compensate for the hillside beneath it. The southern portion of the floor is raised, the northern portion cut back into the slope, so that the usable space within the walls ends up broadly flat. That kind of deliberate groundwork points to a structure that mattered to whoever built it, even if the precise purpose remains unclear.

The enclosure is roughly sixteen metres across, defined by a stone wall built around a core of small stones and earth, faced on both sides by rows of contiguous upright slabs, with larger boulders substituted occasionally where the slabs give out. A more recent drystone wall has been laid directly on top of part of the older structure, partly obscuring it, though traces of the original uprights are still visible at the base, both inside and outside the circuit. Just outside a slight depression in the southern wall, there is a level circular area about two metres across, filled with loose stones, the function of which is not entirely obvious. The enclosure does not sit in isolation. A relict field boundary, one of the ghostly lines left by long-abandoned agricultural organisation, runs away to the north. Burnt spreads, scatters of fire-reddened or blackened material that sometimes indicate prehistoric cooking sites or funerary activity, have been recorded roughly thirty metres to the north-east and around a hundred and forty metres to the south-west. A standing stone lies about forty metres to the north-north-east, in the next field over, lending the whole cluster a quality that feels purposeful rather than accidental, a loose constellation of ancient features arranged across the same quiet valley slope.

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