Enclosure, Wolfestown, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Wolfestown, Co. Kildare

Somewhere in the early twentieth century, a cartographer working on the revised Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded something at Wolfestown in County Kildare that no longer exists: a raised circular area roughly forty metres across, ringed by an outer bank that curved from north-northwest to east-northeast and from south to west-northwest, giving the whole feature an external diameter of approximately seventy metres along its northeast-southwest axis. That description fits the profile of a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure, the kind of earthwork that might once have served as a ringfort or enclosed settlement, though what Wolfestown's enclosure actually was is now impossible to say with any certainty.

By 1972, when the site was visited and formally noted, there was nothing left to see. The raised area had gone, and what remained was simply a flat-topped hill. The disappearance was not subtle or gradual. Aerial photography taken in 2000 shows the site and the ground to its south bearing the unmistakable marks of extensive quarrying, the kind of extraction that strips away earthworks thoroughly and leaves the underlying topography reshaped. The enclosure had been mapped as a living feature in the OS editions produced between 1913 and 1917, which means that sometime in the intervening decades, whatever had survived into the modern period was removed entirely. The map record is now the only detailed evidence that the feature existed at all.

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Pete F
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