Enclosure, Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny

An oval enclosure in Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny, survives today not as a visible earthwork but as a ghost in the soil, betrayed only by a cropmark visible from above.

The enclosure, roughly 40 metres along its north-east to south-west axis and about 26 metres across, once sat along the southern edge of a band of rough, scrubby ground. It was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, flanked by two quarries, one about 10 metres to the south-west and another around 20 metres to the south-east. At some point between that original survey and the 1899 to 1902 revision of the same map, the old field boundaries were reorganised and the enclosure was levelled, its outline erased from the landscape by agricultural reworking.

What the revised map could not erase was the fosse, the enclosure ditch, cut into the ground beneath. A fosse of this kind, dug to define and defend a settlement or enclosure, leaves a lasting impression in subsoil long after any surface trace disappears. In July 2018, satellite imagery captured a well-defined cropmark revealing the north-west quadrant of the original ditch. Cropmarks appear when buried features affect how crops grow above them, with ditches tending to retain more moisture and produce lusher, taller growth that shows up clearly from altitude. The cropmark at Bramblestown was identified by Simon Dowling, and the clarity of what he spotted suggests the fosse was both deep and substantial. The remainder of the enclosure, the other three quadrants, has left no comparable trace in the available imagery, which makes the survival of even this partial signal the more striking.

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