Earthwork, Sweethill, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ritual/Ceremonial
There is an earthwork in County Kilkenny that no longer exists, at least not in any form the eye can detect.
On the highest point of the grounds surrounding Beechhill House in Sweethill, occupying a hilltop with commanding views over the surrounding grass and arable land, a monument once stood that has since been completely levelled. Today, standing on that same hill, there is nothing to see. The interest lies precisely in the disappearance.
The oldest record of the site comes from the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, which marks the hilltop as a small, roughly rectangular tree plantation measuring approximately 95 metres on its longer axis and 75 metres on its shorter, with a townland and barony boundary running along its northern edge and a road along its east side. By the time the OS revised its mapping in 1900, something had changed. The plantation was gone, and in its place the cartographers recorded a roughly D-shaped raised platform, narrower at the south than the north, defined by hachures, the short lines used by mapmakers to indicate slopes and changes in level. The steeper drop was along the eastern side. Whether the earthwork had always been there beneath the trees, or whether its form only became legible once the plantation was cleared, is not clear. What is certain is that an aerial photograph taken in 1973 shows the monument had been fully levelled by that point, absorbed back into the agricultural ground around it.