Enclosure, Ballymack, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballymack, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Ballymack, Co. Kilkenny, there is a roughly rectangular patch of ground that has quietly held its shape for centuries without walls, ditches, or any obvious surface feature to explain why it was there in the first place.

What survives is mostly a cartographic ghost: a dashed outline on the 1947 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the kind of broken line that surveyors used to indicate something present but unenclosed, a boundary without a boundary.

The feature measures approximately 26 metres on its northeast to southwest axis and around 22 metres across, running northeast from an existing northwest to southeast field boundary. That alignment, adhering to an older division in the landscape, hints that whatever function this enclosure once served, it was laid out in deliberate relation to the surrounding fieldscape rather than dropped arbitrarily into it. Enclosures of this kind are a broad category in Irish archaeology, ranging from early medieval settlement sites to burial grounds to livestock enclosures, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say which is which. What is notable here is that the feature was independently confirmed through aerial photography commissioned by Bord Gáis, meaning that from the air, at least under certain light or crop conditions, the ground still betrays its outline.

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Pete F
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