Enclosure, Grevine, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Grevine, Co. Kilkenny

On a low rise in Grevine, County Kilkenny, there is a circular enclosure that no longer exists above ground, and yet it remains visible, at least to those who know what to look for.

The earthwork, roughly sixty metres in diameter, survived long enough to be recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, which also noted a small quarry cut into its north-eastern interior. By the time the map was revised in 1947, the enclosure was already being eroded away; field boundaries had begun to cut across its edges, and a second quarry had appeared in its southern portion. Sometime between that revision and 1989, the monument was levelled entirely, its banks and ditches flattened into the surrounding farmland.

What saved it from complete obscurity was aerial photography. In July 1989, the enclosure was identified as a cropmark, the faint but legible ghost that buried or demolished earthworks leave in growing crops during dry summers, when soil above ancient ditches retains more moisture and produces slightly different vegetation than the compacted ground around it. This is how a great many Irish enclosures, ringforts among them, survive in the modern landscape: not as structures but as signatures in the soil, readable only from above and only under the right conditions. The Grevine enclosure sits roughly thirty metres west of a public road running north to south, which means it would have been a prominent feature in the local landscape for centuries before agriculture and quarrying gradually consumed it.

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Pete F
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