Enclosure, Graignagreana, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Graignagreana, Co. Kerry

There is a small circular ruin in the boggy pasture of Graignagreana, in County Kerry, that does not appear on any Ordnance Survey map.

Its absence from the official cartographic record is, in its quiet way, the most striking thing about it. The structure simply exists, unregistered, beside the Cummeralooderry stream, a minor tributary of the Owenreagh river, on the Iveragh Peninsula.

The enclosure is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 10.3 metres by 9.5 metres internally, which makes it modest in scale, perhaps comparable to a large room. Its stone wall, built with rough horizontal coursing, survives to only about half a metre in height and is some 0.8 metres wide. At the northern arc, peat has crept over the wall and begun to absorb it back into the ground. Enclosures of this general type, sometimes called ring forts or cashels depending on their construction and context, were among the most common settlement forms in early medieval Ireland, typically serving as farmsteads with a surrounding wall that defined domestic and agricultural space. Whether this particular example dates to that period or to some other is not currently known, and its unmapped status means it has attracted relatively little formal attention.

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Pete F
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