Enclosure, Banse Glebe, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Banse Glebe, Co. Kilkenny

At Banse Glebe in County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure roughly 55 metres across was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, yet by the time cartographers revised the same map around 1900, it had all but vanished from the landscape.

What the later map shows in its place are field boundaries that loosely follow the original outline, suggesting the monument had been absorbed into the working farmland around it rather than simply abandoned.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish countryside, most often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is difficult to say precisely what this one was or when it was constructed. A fosse, the term for the ditch that typically ran around the perimeter of such enclosures, appears to have defined its edge. The 1839 map caught it at a point when it was still legible as a monument; the six decades between that survey and the 1900 revision were apparently enough for agricultural levelling to erase much of what remained above ground.

Satellite imagery examined in July 2020 tells a more nuanced story than the later map alone would suggest. The south, west, and north-west arc of the enclosure appears to have been levelled, but a depression marking the line of the fosse is still visible from the air. Along the opposite arc, from north-west through north to south-east, the boundary of the enclosure seems to have been quietly incorporated into a surviving field boundary, its outline preserved not as a monument but as a property line, which is perhaps the most discreet way a thing can continue to exist.

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