Enclosure, Grange, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
There is almost nothing to see at Grange in County Kilkenny, at least not from ground level.
What survives of a substantial circular enclosure exists almost entirely as a cropmark, a ghostly outline pressed into the soil of a tillage field, visible only from the air or through satellite imagery. That near-invisibility is partly what makes it interesting. The enclosure, roughly 60 metres in diameter, was once defined by a wide, deep fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, running continuously around its circumference with no apparent entrance gap. A second, outer fosse encircled that, separated from the inner one by approximately 7 metres, giving the monument a double-ringed character that places it among the more elaborate examples of its type in the Irish landscape.
By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its first six-inch map in 1839, the site was already reduced to a faint oval outline in the tillage, though it was recorded clearly enough to be mapped. By the 1900 revision, only the southern arc was still legible on the ground, the rest absorbed or obscured by agricultural use. Field boundaries running north to south, some of them probably established during eighteenth or nineteenth-century cultivation, cut directly through the eastern interior of the monument and skirt its eastern and western flanks. A connecting fosse between the inner and outer rings in the southern sector may itself relate to one of these later field divisions rather than the original monument. An aerial photograph taken on 17 July 1967 confirmed the enclosure's cropmark signature, and satellite imagery from July 2018 brought it back into focus with enough clarity to distinguish the varying depths and widths of the outer fosse, which is more pronounced in the south-east and fades to a faint trace in the north-west. A second enclosure of similar character sits roughly 120 metres to the east-north-east, suggesting the area was once a more organised or settled landscape than the bare tillage fields now suggest.