Concentric enclosure, Wallslough, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Wallslough, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Wallslough, Co. Kilkenny, a monument that has entirely vanished from the ground still shows its shape from the air.

The enclosure, roughly 73 metres across, left no visible trace above the soil after it was levelled, yet aerial photographs taken in the 1990s and early 2000s reveal it as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression that appears when buried features cause crops above them to grow at subtly different rates or colours. What makes the site particularly striking is that the photographs disclose not one ring but two, a concentric arrangement in which an inner enclosure of around 34 metres in diameter sits within the larger outer one, the gap between the two fosses, the ditches that once defined each ring, measuring somewhere between 14 and 20 metres. The inner enclosure has a well-defined entrance facing roughly south-east.

The site was already recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and appeared again on the revision of 1899 to 1902, described on both occasions as a roughly circular enclosure. Even then, something of its original form was readable on the landscape. More quietly telling is a field boundary that runs east to west along the northern side of the monument; it kinks outward at precisely the point where the enclosure's curved perimeter would have been, suggesting that whoever laid out that boundary, at some point after the enclosure itself had gone, was still working around a shape they could detect or remember. A further large curvilinear enclosure lies approximately 10 metres to the south-west and may represent part of a field system associated with the site, though the relationship between the two remains uncertain.

Concentric enclosures of this type are relatively uncommon in the Irish archaeological record, and the presence of a defined entrance on the inner ring points to deliberate planning rather than casual accumulation of boundaries over time. Whether the site was a ringfort, a ritual enclosure, or something else entirely is not established, but the double-ring form and the probable associated enclosure nearby suggest a place of some organisational significance in the early medieval or prehistoric landscape of this part of Kilkenny.

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