Enclosure, Coorleagh, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Coorleagh, Co. Kilkenny

There is an ancient enclosure at Coorleagh in County Kilkenny that nobody walking the land would ever know was there.

It exists, in practical terms, only as a mark on an aerial photograph taken sometime between 1973 and 1977 by the Geological Survey of Ireland, a faint circular ghost impressed into the ground that the camera caught and the eye at surface level cannot. The monument is entirely invisible from the ground, absorbed into what is now reclaimed grassland, leaving no ridge, no hollow, no stony trace to betray it.

What the aerial photograph revealed is a roughly circular enclosure approximately 60 metres in diameter. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, typically interpreted as the remains of a ringfort or rath, a type of enclosed farmstead used predominantly during the early medieval period, though some examples are considerably older. The site sits along the foot of the eastern side of a north-south valley, in a landscape of low rolling hillocks, the kind of quietly unremarkable terrain that has a habit of concealing things very effectively. Reclamation of the surrounding grassland over the centuries has done the rest, smoothing away whatever earthworks once defined the boundary of the enclosure.

For anyone curious enough to visit the townland, the valley setting gives reasonable views along its length, though there is little prospect of locating the enclosure itself on foot. It is one of those places whose interest lies almost entirely in the knowledge that something is there, rather than in anything that can be seen or touched.

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Pete F
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