Enclosure, Dangan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Dangan, Co. Kilkenny

In the townland of Dangan in County Kilkenny, a field boundary or earthwork has been recorded as an archaeological enclosure, the kind of feature that can appear as little more than a subtle rise in the ground or a slightly too-regular curve in a hedgerow.

Enclosures of this type are among the most common and least-celebrated monuments in the Irish landscape. They range from prehistoric ringforts, which served as enclosed farmsteads, to early medieval cashels built from dry stone, to more ambiguous earthworks whose function and date remain uncertain. What unites them is the basic human impulse to draw a boundary around a place and hold it apart from everything outside.

Dangan is a small townland, and the enclosure recorded there has not yet been fully documented in publicly available form. Without excavation or detailed survey, it is difficult to say whether the feature dates to the early medieval period, when ringforts were constructed in their thousands across Ireland, or whether it belongs to some earlier or later phase of activity. Kilkenny as a county contains a considerable variety of such monuments, from well-preserved earthen raths on farmland to stone-built enclosures associated with early ecclesiastical sites. Where exactly this particular example fits within that spectrum remains, for now, an open question.

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