Enclosure, Kilcannon, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Enclosures
In a tillage field near the Finisk River in County Waterford, something old is hiding in plain sight, though you would need to be looking from above to see it. A curvilinear enclosure roughly thirty metres in diameter lies beneath the farmland at Kilcannon, its outline preserved not in stone or earthwork but as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression that appears in aerial or satellite imagery when buried features affect how crops grow above them. The circular form of a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch cut into the ground, shows up in Apple Maps satellite imagery, invisible to anyone walking the field but legible from altitude as a faint ring in the soil.
The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, whose scrutiny of satellite imagery brought this otherwise unrecorded feature to light. Curvilinear enclosures of this kind are commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often the remains of a rath or ringfort, the most numerous class of monument in the Irish countryside. The Finisk River, which meanders roughly northeast to southwest about seventy metres to the west-northwest of the enclosure, would have made this a practical location for habitation, offering water within easy reach of a defined, enclosed space. The agricultural use of the land over centuries has levelled whatever above-ground bank or ditch once defined the site, leaving only the buried cut as evidence.