Enclosure, Ardscull, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ardscull, Co. Kildare

There is nothing to see at Ardscull, Co. Kildare, and that absence is precisely the point. Somewhere beneath the tillage fields here lies the ghost of an enclosure that was already old enough to be mapped as an antiquity when the Ordnance Survey cartographers came through in 1839. Enclosures of this kind, roughly oval or circular earthworks that once defined a farmstead, a ritual space, or a place of enclosure for livestock, were common features of the Irish countryside for centuries before agriculture gradually erased them. This one has gone further than most.

The first edition of the OS six-inch map records the feature as a narrow oval, estimated at roughly thirty metres across on its longer east-northeast to west-southwest axis and about fifteen metres on the shorter north-northwest to south-southeast axis. The southern edge had already been absorbed into a later field boundary by the time of that survey, suggesting the enclosure was losing its integrity even then. In the years since, the surrounding field boundaries have been cleared entirely, and no visible surface trace of the monument survives today. What the 1839 map preserved on paper, the land itself has quietly forgotten.

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Pete F
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