Enclosure, Ballynalina, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynalina, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath a tilled field in Ballynalina, County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure sits largely invisible to anyone walking past.

It has no upstanding walls, no signage, no obvious presence on the ground at all. What gives it away is the soil itself: the buried fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch cut into the earth in prehistory or the early medieval period, holds moisture differently from the surrounding ground, and that difference shows up in the crops above it. On satellite imagery captured in August 2015, the enclosure appears as a cropmark, a faint ring roughly thirty metres in diameter, the kind of trace that rewards patience and a good eye for aerial photographs.

The enclosure does not stand alone. Another circular enclosure of similar dimensions lies approximately fifty metres to the north-west, and two ring-ditches, which are typically the buried remains of prehistoric burial monuments, sit a little further out, between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and ninety metres to the north-west. Whether these features are related in date or function is not established, but their clustering in this one stretch of farmland suggests the area was meaningful to people over a considerable span of time. Enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, associated variously with settlement, ritual, or territorial marking, and many, like this one, survive only as cropmarks because centuries of agriculture have levelled whatever was once visible above the surface.

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Pete F
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