Enclosure, Ballycarran Little, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballycarran Little, Co. Kilkenny

There is an enclosure in a field near Ballycarran Little in County Kilkenny that no one standing in that field can see.

It exists, clearly and unmistakably, only when viewed from the air. Roughly thirty-six metres across, circular, defined by a wide fosse (a ditch, typically cut to mark or defend a boundary) with a deliberate gap on the eastern side, the whole structure is entirely invisible at ground level. The land has been reclaimed for pasture and tillage, and the surface gives nothing away. It is only when crops grow unevenly over buried features, revealing the outlines of ancient earthworks through differences in colour and height, that the enclosure announces itself.

Those differential crop patterns, known as cropmarks, have been captured on aerial photographs taken on at least three separate occasions: in July 1970, July 1971, and again in July 1989. Satellite imagery from June 2018 confirms the same outline still showing through. The enclosure sits on the flat, low-lying floor of the Nore valley, about 480 metres east of the river itself, and there are fair to good views across the valley from this spot. Some fifty metres to the north-west lies a separate ring-ditch, another buried feature of presumably related, if not identical, antiquity. Together they suggest this quiet stretch of reclaimed farmland was once a place of some deliberate organisation, though what the enclosure contained or who made it remains unrecorded.

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Pete F
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