Enclosure, Barnaviddaun, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Barnaviddaun, Co. Kilkenny

At Barnaviddaun in County Kilkenny, an oval enclosure roughly sixty metres across has managed to disappear twice: first from the landscape itself, and then from any trace visible to someone walking the field.

It exists now only as a ghost in the soil, a cropmark legible from satellite altitude but entirely invisible at ground level.

The enclosure was real enough in 1839, when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it clearly, along with a road that cut across its northern sector on a northwest to southeast alignment. An enclosure of this type, defined by a fosse (a surrounding ditch) and likely once by an earthen bank, would have enclosed a homestead or farmstead, a common form of settlement across early medieval Ireland. By the time the OS revised its mapping in 1900 to 1901, both the enclosure and the road had vanished from the record, suggesting that both had been levelled during the intervening decades, probably as agricultural improvement pushed cultivation across older earthworks. What the nineteenth century left standing, the early twentieth century erased. The fosse, measuring approximately fifty-two metres on its northwest to southeast axis and forty metres northeast to southwest, survived only as a buried feature, its outline preserved in differential soil moisture and revealed in a Google Earth image captured on 14 July 2018, when the growing crop above it responded differently to the buried ditch than to the undisturbed ground around it.

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Pete F
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