Enclosure, Aughkiletaun, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In the farmed landscape of Aughkiletaun in County Kilkenny, something old enough to command respect from those who drew Ireland's earliest modern maps sits quietly among tillage and pasture fields.
It is an enclosure, oval in shape, roughly forty metres across its longer axis and thirty across its shorter, and what makes it quietly remarkable is not what it contains but what surrounds it. A townland boundary, one of those invisible administrative lines that criss-cross rural Ireland, appears on early cartography to kink outward at the northern edge, as though deliberately avoiding the monument. Boundaries of that kind tend to follow the path of least resistance; when they deviate, it usually means something was already there that people felt compelled to go around.
The enclosure first appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, already depicted as a feature distinct from the surrounding field pattern. By the time the 1900 revision and the twenty-five-inch OS map were produced, the same feature is shown again, though with somewhat straighter sides, and a field boundary is recorded running close to its western edge. The slight change in how it was drawn between those two surveys may reflect differences in surveying technique or simply in what the cartographers could observe on the ground, but the monument's presence remained consistently acknowledged across more than sixty years of mapping. Enclosures of this general type in Ireland are often the remains of early medieval ringforts, circular or oval earthwork enclosures that once served as farmsteads or settlement sites, though without excavation it is not possible to say more precisely what this one represents or when it was built.
More recent satellite imagery shows the enclosure heavily overgrown, its perimeter thickened with trees and scrub. That kind of vegetation often accumulates around earthworks precisely because the raised or disturbed ground was never ploughed, left alone as awkward or inaccessible while the fields around it were worked. The overgrowth that obscures the site also, in its way, preserves it.