Enclosure, Ballyring, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
There is an enclosure at Ballyring in County Kilkenny that you cannot see.
It sits on a terrace on a north-east-facing slope in rolling grassland, and there is nothing there now, at least nothing above the surface. The monument has been fully levelled, leaving no trace visible at ground level. What makes it quietly odd is that it exists in the documentary record with some precision, mapped twice across six decades, and yet the ground itself offers no confirmation.
The enclosure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and again on the 1900 revision. From those two snapshots it was roughly sub-circular, measuring approximately forty metres north to south and forty-four metres east to west. Its shape was not a clean oval; the northern and eastern sides ran in straight lines, while the arc from the south-east around to the north-west was gently curving. Enclosures of this kind in Ireland are often associated with early medieval settlement, occasionally with earlier activity, though without excavation it is impossible to say what purpose this one served or when it was in use. What the maps do confirm is that it was still recognisable as a feature in 1900, which means its levelling happened at some point in the twentieth century, most likely through agricultural improvement of the land.