Enclosure, Courtnaboghilla, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Courtnaboghilla, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Courtnaboghilla, County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure roughly 45 to 50 metres across has managed to survive in the only way left open to it: as a ghost.

Above ground there is nothing to see. Below the surface, the buried outline of a fosse, a defensive ditch that once defined the perimeter, retains just enough moisture and organic difference to affect the growth of crops overhead. From the air, that difference becomes visible as a cropmark, a faint but legible ring pressed into the soil.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, drawn when it was still a recognisable feature in the landscape. At that time a quarry, roughly 40 metres north to south and 42 metres east to west, sat immediately to the south, its edge running right up against the enclosure's southern bank. Sometime in the following decades, both features were altered beyond surface recognition. By the time the OS revised its mapping around 1900, the enclosure had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting it had been levelled, most probably in the course of agricultural improvement. The quarry too was eventually filled in, and while it no longer reads as a hollow in the ground, satellite imagery captured in July 2018 shows it as a dark stain in the soil just south of where the enclosure's fosse curves around. The two marks together, one a ring, one a smudge, preserve the rough shape of what the 1839 map recorded.

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Pete F
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