Enclosure, Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Bramblestown, County Kilkenny, the ground holds the ghost of an ancient enclosure that no one walking past would necessarily notice.

It has no visible walls or banks to speak of, at least not in full. What survives is a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features influence how plants grow above them, causing subtle variations in colour and height that become legible from the air. On an aerial photograph taken on 20 August 1991, the curvilinear outline of a roughly circular enclosure came into view, approximately 34 metres in diameter and defined originally by a fosse, the term used for a ditch dug around an enclosed space, often to demarcate a settlement, a ceremonial area, or a place of some communal significance.

The southern portion of the enclosure does not appear even as a cropmark, because an existing field boundary running roughly east to west along that edge has obscured or absorbed whatever trace remained there. The northern arc, however, persists, and satellite imagery from July 2018 confirms the pattern is still legible from above. About ten metres to the east, a relic stream, long since dried or diverted, leaves its own faint signature in the soil. The enclosure does not sit alone in the landscape either. Roughly 80 metres to the north-north-west, a rectilinear enclosure appears as a cropmark, and approximately 270 metres to the north-west, a circular enclosure does the same. Other cropmarks scattered across the field may represent the remnants of an associated field system, suggesting that what is preserved here is not one isolated feature but a fragment of a much wider pattern of early land use and occupation.

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Pete F
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