Concentric enclosure, Tullaherin, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Tullaherin, Co. Kilkenny

In the fields of Tullaherin, Co. Kilkenny, a double ring once marked the landscape with unusual precision.

The inner circle measured roughly 45 metres across, and a second, outer enclosure wrapped around it at a distance of between 15 and 25 metres, bringing the overall diameter to around 95 metres. Concentric enclosures of this kind are relatively rare in the Irish archaeological record; the double-ring arrangement, with one earthwork sitting inside another, is thought to indicate a site of particular status or significance, though the exact function of any individual example is rarely straightforward to determine.

When the Ordnance Survey mapped the area for the first edition of its six-inch series in 1839, both enclosures were clearly present, along with a farm trackway running northwest to southeast through the southern portion of the outer ring and continuing up to the edge of the inner one. A field boundary ran from that trackway and met the inner enclosure on its west-southwest side, suggesting that by the early nineteenth century the site had been absorbed into working agricultural land. By the time the OS returned for the 1899 to 1902 revision, only the inner enclosure appeared on the map. The outer ring had, it seems, been levelled in the intervening decades, lost to the same slow attrition of field clearance and farming that has removed so many earthworks across the Irish countryside.

The outer enclosure has not entirely vanished. Its faint trace remains legible on satellite imagery, a ghostly ring in the soil that survives the plough only as a cropmark or soil differential. The inner enclosure is still standing in some form, though it is now heavily overgrown with trees and scrub. A second enclosure lies roughly 90 metres to the northeast, hinting that this corner of Kilkenny was once a more structured and purposeful place than the present fields suggest.

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