Enclosure, Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In the townland of Bramblestown, a circular earthwork roughly 38 metres across sits almost entirely consumed by trees and scrub, its outline traceable on nineteenth-century maps but now wrapped in forestry plantation.
This kind of enclosure, a roughly circular earthen bank and ditch that once defined a farmstead or settlement, was common across early medieval Ireland, and dozens survive in County Kilkenny alone. What makes this particular example quietly interesting is not any single dramatic feature but rather the cluster it belongs to: two further enclosures lie within 130 metres of it, one immediately to the west and another to the south-west, suggesting that whoever once lived and worked here was not living in isolation but as part of a small, organised landscape.
The enclosure was already recorded by the time the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1839, and it appears again on the revision carried out between 1899 and 1902, described consistently as circular. The 1839 mapping places it within an area of gorse, the low thorny scrub also known locally as furze or whins, with a long narrow pond lying about 90 metres to the south, measuring around 155 metres in length and no more than 12 metres across at its widest. That combination of rough grazing land, standing water nearby, and multiple enclosures in close proximity points to a working agricultural territory rather than anything ceremonial or defensive, though without excavation the enclosure's precise age and function remain open questions.