Enclosure, Ballyredding, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyredding, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Ballyredding, County Kilkenny, there is an enclosure that most people walking past would never notice.

No wall, no mound, no visible trace at ground level marks it out. What betrays its existence is a fosse, a defensive ditch cut in a ring, that only became apparent when seen from the air.

The enclosure was identified from an aerial photograph taken on 19 July 1967, part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. From altitude, the crop or soil marks revealed the outline of a roughly circular enclosure approximately 27 metres in diameter. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though their dates and functions vary considerably. The fosse would originally have defined a bounded space, perhaps encircling a farmstead or dwelling. Since that 1967 photograph was taken, the landscape around the site has changed in ways that make the enclosure harder to contextualise: a field boundary immediately to the west of the enclosure has been removed, as has another boundary roughly 60 metres to the north. Those losses are not unusual in post-war Irish farming, when land consolidation saw many older boundaries cleared, but they mean the enclosure now sits in a subtly different agricultural setting than the one in which it was first recorded.

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Pete F
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