Enclosure, Holdenstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Holdenstown, Co. Kilkenny

A D-shaped enclosure on elevated ground in County Kilkenny turns out, on closer inspection, to be a site that kept accumulating significance across several different periods.

The ditch, roughly 40 metres in external diameter and averaging about 2.6 metres wide, was never backed by a bank; it was simply left open after construction, and naturally occurring springs ensured it filled with water over time. That detail alone is unusual. Most enclosures of this kind are understood as bounded, defined spaces, yet here the water appears to have arrived not by design but by geological accident.

The site came to light during excavation in 2007, carried out ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road improvement scheme. What the dig revealed was a layered sequence of use reaching back well before the enclosure itself was built. The D-shaped ditch cut across two ring-ditches, which are circular earthwork features typically associated with prehistoric burial, and it also truncated two burials lying within one of those ring-ditches. A third ring-ditch sat inside the enclosure's interior, while a fourth, spotted on aerial photography taken in 1989, lies just outside the excavated area to the north-west, unexcavated. The enclosure also respected an earlier linear feature running north-east to south-west across the area, suggesting the people who dug the ditch were working around, or perhaps deliberately acknowledging, something already present in the landscape. An entrance causeway, roughly 4.5 metres wide, faced east. Finds recovered from successive layers of ditch fill included a quantity of animal bone, five possibly worked stones, a metal blade, and what may be a whetstone. Five inhumation burials were recorded within one of the associated ring-ditches, with two further inhumations and a possible cremation pit excavated within the larger enclosure itself. The excavation was published by Whitty in 2009 and summarised in 2010.

The site sits on commanding high ground, which lends it a quality common to places that saw repeated ceremonial or communal use across long stretches of prehistory. Whether the enclosure was built to contain, commemorate, or simply organise a space already understood as significant is a question the archaeology leaves open.

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