Enclosure, Glashare, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glashare, Co. Kilkenny

In the flat, reclaimed grassland of the Goul river valley in County Kilkenny, there is an enclosure that exists only on paper.

Roughly circular and measuring around thirty metres across, it appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, with a road skirting its south-eastern edge on a north-east to south-west alignment. Stand on the spot today, and there is nothing to see. The land offers no rise, no crop mark, no hollow, no trace whatsoever at ground level.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, most often the remains of ringforts, which were enclosed farmsteads typically built during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. They ranged from modest earthen banks surrounding a single family's dwelling to more substantial enclosures with deep ditches and timber palisades. The example at Glashare was already ghostly by the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers passed through in the 1830s, recorded as a feature of the landscape rather than a standing monument. The valley floor here is reclaimed land, drained and levelled for agriculture over generations, and that process of improvement is almost certainly what erased whatever banks or ditches once defined the site. The 1839 map preserves its outline; the ground does not.

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