Enclosure, Clonygarra, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
At Clonygarra in County Kilkenny, an ancient circular enclosure has been disappearing in slow motion across nearly two centuries of mapping.
What survives today is not a wall, a bank, or even a visible curve in the ground, but a ghostly outline detectable only from the air, the kind of trace that reminds you how much of Ireland's past is present without being seen.
The enclosure was first recorded on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1839, which captured the southern and south-western arc of a roughly circular structure, with a chord measurement of around 37 metres and an estimated overall diameter of about 45 metres. Enclosures of this general type and scale are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often serving as the defining boundary of a farmstead or small monastic site. By the time the OS revised its six-inch map in 1948, the arc had been absorbed into an adjoining field boundary, though the original curve was preserved in the line of that boundary, almost as an unconscious memory retained in the landscape. Satellite imagery captured between 2011 and 2013 shows the next stage of that erasure: the field boundary itself has since been levelled, and what remains of the enclosure is now visible only as a cropmark, a subtle variation in vegetation growth above buried soil disturbance that reveals the form of things no longer standing above ground.