Enclosure, Ballygowney, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballygowney, Co. Kilkenny

In a field at Ballygowney in County Kilkenny, a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly in the landscape, visible not to the passing eye but only from above, picked out in satellite imagery as a crop or soil mark betraying something beneath the surface.

It measures approximately 33 metres across on its north-west to south-east axis and around 30 metres on the north-east to south-west, making it a modest but distinctly deliberate shape, the kind of near-perfect circle that does not occur by accident in Irish farmland.

What the enclosure actually represents remains unconfirmed. In Irish archaeology, circular enclosures of this scale are frequently associated with ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were built in their thousands across Ireland between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch surrounding a domestic settlement. Whether this example falls into that category, or represents something earlier or later, is not yet established. What makes its situation particularly interesting is the company it keeps. A confirmed ringfort lies roughly 350 metres to the north-west, and a moated site sits approximately 150 metres to the south-south-west. Moated sites, which are medieval in character and typically consist of a rectangular island platform surrounded by a water-filled ditch, were most commonly built by Anglo-Norman settlers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onward. Having three distinct enclosure types within such a compact area suggests that this corner of Kilkenny saw repeated and layered episodes of settlement across several centuries, each generation marking its territory in the ground in its own way.

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