Enclosure, Ballyragget, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
Beneath a row of ordinary houses in Ballyragget, Co. Kilkenny, there may lie the ghost of a rath, one of the circular earthen enclosures that dot the Irish landscape in their thousands and were typically used as defended farmsteads during the early medieval period.
This one has left no trace at ground level. Nothing marks it, nothing commemorates it, and the casual passer-by would have no reason to suspect it ever existed.
The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded that the garden of Ballyragget Lodge, immediately adjacent to the eastern wall of the castle yard, had once contained a large circular area enclosed by an earthen rampart, locally referred to as a rath. Around 1850 it was levelled and the space converted into something called "the bower," a garden feature that has itself since vanished. The bawn, the walled enclosure associated with the nearby castle, still defines the eastern edge of the area, and a row of houses now runs north to south from the entrance road, their rear plots pressing up against the outer face of that eastern bawn wall. It is quite possible that these houses were built directly over the site of the former enclosure, quietly erasing whatever remained of it.
What makes the place worth pausing over is precisely this layering: a medieval earthwork swallowed by a Victorian garden, which was in turn swallowed by domestic housing, all of it pressed against the walls of a castle yard. The rath itself may be gone, but the sequence of its disappearance, documented by Carrigan before the last traces faded, offers a small, precise record of how the past gets quietly built over.