Moat, Coologmartin, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

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Moat, Coologmartin, Co. Kildare

On the top of Crockberry Hill in County Kildare, at around 335 feet above sea level, there is almost nothing to see. A slight depression in the ground is about all that remains of a site once significant enough to be named and mapped. That name, 'Moat', is itself a clue, the word used in Irish placenames not for a water-filled ditch but typically for an earthen mound or raised enclosure, often of early medieval origin.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1838, recorded the site as a small, circular enclosure, with what appears to have been a quarry or sandpit marked a little to the north. By 1972, even that modest outline had been erased. The landowner at the time reported that a depression near the summit had been infilled, levelled off, and reseeded for meadow. The landscape closed over whatever was there. What the eye can no longer find on the ground, however, aerial photography has partially recovered: a cropmark, the kind of subtle tonal difference in growing vegetation that reveals buried ditches and features below the surface, shows the line of a fosse defining the southern edge of what was once a roughly circular enclosure. A fosse is simply a defensive or boundary ditch, and this one suggests an area approximately 55 metres in diameter, a substantial monument by any measure.

The site sits in pasture, and with no upstanding earthwork remaining there is little to orient a visitor once on the hill. The cropmark evidence is visible only from the air, in the right season and under the right conditions, which means the most revealing view of this place is one taken from an aircraft rather than on foot.

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Pete F
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