Enclosure, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny

In a tillage field near Clomantagh in County Kilkenny, something invisible to the eye at ground level becomes legible only from above.

An oval enclosure, roughly 63 metres north to south and 72 metres east to west, reveals itself as a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried or disturbed ground causes the plants growing above it to develop differently from their surroundings, producing a ghostly outline that only aerial photography can read clearly. No bank, no ditch, no obvious surface trace survives; the shape exists now mainly as a pattern of differential growth caught on satellite imagery.

The enclosure was identified in 2005 using Ordnance Survey orthographic satellite photography. A modern field boundary runs along part of its western and northern perimeter, though the boundary appears to curve around the monument rather than cut through it, which suggests some awareness, perhaps accidental, of the older feature beneath. What the enclosure originally was, and when it was built, is not recorded, but its oval form and scale place it broadly within the range of early medieval or prehistoric enclosed settlements common across the Irish midlands and south-east. It does not sit in isolation. A ringfort, one of the circular earthwork enclosures associated primarily with early medieval farming settlements in Ireland, lies approximately 220 metres to the north-east, and a second enclosure of uncertain character sits about 150 metres to the east-north-east. The clustering of these features across a relatively small area of ground hints at a landscape that was, at some point, considerably more organised and inhabited than its present agricultural plainness would suggest.

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Pete F
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