Earthwork, Baunballinlough, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Baunballinlough, Co. Kilkenny

At the crest of a gentle slope in County Kilkenny, where rolling grassland tips down towards a valley bottom, a cluster of earthworks sits largely unnoticed in the grass.

What makes this site quietly odd is its layering: several distinct shapes occupy a relatively small area, and they do not all obviously belong to the same period or purpose. A circular enclosure roughly ten metres across, defined by a raised bank, sits alongside two square raised platforms of similar dimensions, and a trackway runs along the southern edge of the field. None of these features is sharply defined; they have the soft, subsided look of things that have been under the soil for a very long time.

The Down Survey, the ambitious mid-seventeenth-century mapping project commissioned after the Cromwellian conquest to record landownership across Ireland, shows a settlement in this precise area. That map marks a house with a chimney, a bawn, and cabins. A bawn was a walled or embanked enclosure, typically attached to a fortified house, used to protect livestock and sometimes to defend the household itself; the term is particularly associated with plantation-era settlement in Ireland. The presence of these features on the Down Survey suggests that some of the earthworks visible today may be the physical remains of that documented settlement, though the relationship between the mapped features and the ground evidence is not straightforward. A field survey carried out in 1987 recorded the smaller enclosures and platforms, while more recent satellite imagery revealed a much larger, roughly rectangular enclosure about fifty metres to the north, measuring approximately ninety-four metres on its longer axis, with a bank that appears to curve at its north-eastern corner. A well lies about fifty-seven metres to the west of the enclosure's southern end, a detail that hints at the practical geography of whatever community once used this ground.

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