Enclosure, Grangefertagh, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
There is something quietly disorienting about a monument that exists only in the historical record and in satellite imagery, with nothing whatsoever to show at ground level.
On a wide natural terrace in the rolling grassland of Grangefertagh, somewhere between the flood plain and the upper valley slopes of this corner of County Kilkenny, a roughly circular enclosure lies entirely beneath the surface, invisible to anyone standing in the field above it.
The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, where it appears as a circle of approximately thirty metres in diameter. Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most poorly understood, monument types in the Irish landscape; they may be the remains of a ringfort, a former farmstead enclosed by an earthen bank, or something considerably older, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. What can be said is that by the time the Ordnance Survey mapped it in the late 1830s, the enclosure was already sufficiently defined to be worth recording. At some point after that, whatever upstanding earthwork or surface trace remained was lost, smoothed away by cultivation or time. Satellite imagery examined in October 2018 showed a trackway running roughly northwest to southeast across the monument, which may partly account for its degraded condition, or may simply be one more layer of activity on a patch of ground that has seen several.