Enclosure, Ballycomy, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
Something once stood on this small bluff above the Deen river valley in County Kilkenny, something circular, deliberate, and now almost entirely gone.
What remains is barely perceptible: a low, roughly circular platform no more than half a metre high at its tallest point, with a maximum diameter of around 27 metres. It sits on a promontory jutting eastward from the western side of the valley, with the ground falling away steeply toward the river below.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, records the site clearly as a circular enclosure. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common feature of the Irish countryside, typically the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead that was widespread from the early medieval period onward. By the time the OS revised its mapping in 1947, the feature had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting that in the intervening century it had been largely ploughed or levelled out of recognition. The bluff it occupies commands wide views northward, eastward, and southward along the Deen river valley, a position that would have made practical sense for whoever once settled there, whether for observation, for farming the surrounding grassland, or simply because elevated ground above a river offered some natural advantage.
At ground level today, the enclosure survives only as that faint platform, easy to miss without knowing where to look. The rolling grassland around it gives little away, and there is no upstanding masonry or earthwork to frame the site against the sky. What the place offers, more than any visible archaeology, is the view itself, the same prospect across the valley that whoever built here would have had, more or less unchanged.