Enclosure, Booly, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Booly, Co. Kilkenny

Most of what survives of this enclosure near Booly in County Kilkenny exists only as a ghost in a field.

The monument itself, once an irregularly shaped earthwork measuring up to roughly 54 metres across, has been almost entirely levelled on its eastern, southern, and western sides. What remains above ground is confined to the north-western, northern, and north-eastern perimeter, preserved almost by accident within a modern field boundary. The rest can only be read from the air, where the fosse, a surrounding ditch approximately 3 metres wide, shows up as a cropmark on satellite imagery, its outline pressed faintly into the soil like a watermark on old paper.

The enclosure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1839, recorded at that point as irregularly shaped. By the 1947 revision it had been re-described as roughly pentagonal, a difference that likely reflects the ongoing erasure of its edges rather than any genuine change in the original form. Field boundaries recorded running north-east from the north-east sector, and roughly east-north-east from the south-east sector, suggest the monument's outline was gradually absorbed into the working geometry of the surrounding farmland, its ditches and banks repurposed as convenient dividing lines. Enclosures of this type, ringforts or their close relations, were once among the most common monument types across Ireland, numbering in the tens of thousands, and were used as defended or semi-defended farmsteads from roughly the early medieval period onward. This one, at Booly, has fared worse than many.

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