Enclosure, Moyleglass, Co. Kerry

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Moyleglass, Co. Kerry

On the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a low ring of collapsed stone sits in the townland of Moyleglass, easy to miss and difficult to date.

What remains is a subcircular enclosure, roughly ten metres across internally, its walling now reduced to little more than a grassy ridge about forty centimetres high and seventy centimetres wide. That modest profile is the result of centuries of slow collapse, but the original form, a roughly circular enclosure defined by a substantial stone wall, would have been a deliberate and labour-intensive construction.

Enclosures of this general type are scattered across early medieval Ireland, often interpreted as the enclosed farmsteads of free farming families, known in the archaeological literature as ringforts. The circular or subcircular plan was the standard domestic arrangement for much of the first millennium and into the early medieval period, with the enclosing wall serving both as a boundary marker and as a means of securing livestock. Whether this particular example at Moyleglass served a domestic, agricultural, or some other function is not recorded. Its dimensions, around ten metres in internal diameter, place it at the smaller end of the scale for such monuments, though it is described as a large subcircular enclosure in the archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996.

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