Enclosure, Furzehouse, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Furzehouse, Co. Kilkenny

In a field near Furzehouse in County Kilkenny, the ground holds the faint outline of several enclosures that have never been excavated, never named, and never fully explained.

They are invisible at ground level, revealing themselves only from the air, where differences in soil moisture and crop growth betray buried ditches as darker or lighter strips of vegetation. This kind of mark, known as a cropmark, is one of the principal ways Irish archaeology discovers sites that left no standing remains.

An aerial photograph taken in July 1996 captured the layout in unusual detail. At the centre is a sub-circular enclosure roughly 35 metres in diameter, defined by a fosse, which is an external ditch typically used to demarcate a settlement or ritual space, with an entrance oriented to the south-west. Attached to it on the east is a circular enclosure, and extending to the north is a conjoined rectangular enclosure whose entrance faces north-west. A ring-ditch, a circular ditched feature often associated with prehistoric funerary activity, sits approximately five metres to the north-west of the sub-circular enclosure. The clustering of these different forms, sub-circular, circular, rectangular, and the ring-ditch alongside them, suggests a complex site that accumulated features over time rather than being laid out in a single phase. Whether the enclosures were broadly contemporary or separated by centuries is something only excavation could answer, and none has been undertaken here.

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Pete F
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