Enclosure, Brandonhill, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Brandonhill, Co. Kilkenny

At the very top of Brandon Hill in County Kilkenny, there is a circular structure so thoroughly reclaimed by grass and time that it barely announces itself.

What was once a walled enclosure now presents as a low, grassed-over spread of stone, roughly doughnut-shaped, with an interior diameter of just under seven metres and an overall width approaching just over ten metres. The wall spread itself runs between one and a half and two metres wide, rising only thirty to forty centimetres above the surrounding ground. No entrance is visible anywhere along its circumference.

The structure sits approximately fifteen metres north of a hilltop cairn, a type of prehistoric burial monument formed from a mound of stones, which occupies the summit proper. The enclosure's relationship to that cairn is not recorded, but the proximity is suggestive of a site with a long, layered history of use. The stone spread contains mostly smaller stones averaging around a quarter of a metre across, interspersed with occasional larger boulders of roughly a metre by a metre, now thoroughly buried in turf. What the enclosure originally served, whether as a dwelling, a ritual space, or something more functional, remains unresolved.

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Pete F
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