Enclosure, Bishopslough Newtown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Bishopslough Newtown, Co. Kilkenny

In a field at Bishopslough Newtown in County Kilkenny, a roughly sub-square enclosure sits buried beneath decades of accumulated trees and scrub, its outline largely swallowed by vegetation.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet least understood features of the Irish landscape, earthwork boundaries that may mark anything from an early medieval farmstead to a later agricultural or ecclesiastical boundary. What makes this one quietly interesting is not dramatic scale but persistence: something defined this patch of ground, planted it with trees, and left it alone long enough for the countryside to close over it entirely.

The enclosure measures approximately 45 metres on its northwest to southeast axis and around 41 metres northeast to southwest, making it a compact but not insignificant feature. It appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, already marked with tree cover, and it was recorded again in the same condition during the 1899 to 1902 revision of that map. The fact that it was deliberately planted with trees, rather than simply abandoned and colonised by scrub, suggests that whoever managed the land in the mid-nineteenth century was aware of the enclosure and chose to treat it as a distinct, bounded space rather than fold it into cultivation. That decision, made perhaps 180 years ago, is the reason anything survives to note today.

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