Enclosure, Blanchvilleskill, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
Beneath a ploughed field in Blanchvilleskill, Co. Kilkenny, lies the outline of an ancient circular enclosure that has never, as far as the record shows, been excavated or even visited with that purpose in mind.
It exists, for now, only as a pattern: a ghostly ring roughly thirty metres across, legible not to the eye on the ground but from the air, where the buried remains of a deep surrounding fosse alter the way crops grow above them. A fosse is simply a ditch, typically cut to define, protect, or ritually bound a space, and this one runs in a near-perfect circle with no discernible gap where an entrance might have been.
The enclosure first came to light on an aerial photograph taken on 26 July 1965, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. Cropmarks of this kind appear when a buried feature retains or repels moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the plants above to ripen at a different rate, producing faint but readable contrasts visible only at the right season and from sufficient height. The 1965 photograph caught exactly that. More than fifty years later, the same circular shadow was still detectable on satellite imagery captured in July 2018, confirming that the feature persists beneath the tillage. The absence of any entrance gap is quietly unusual; most enclosures of this type, whether prehistoric ring forts or later enclosed settlements, show at least one break in the surrounding ditch where access was possible. Whether that gap was never cut, has since silted and closed, or simply falls at an angle the aerial views have not resolved clearly is a question the site itself has not yet answered.