Enclosure, Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
By the late nineteenth century, a circular enclosure that had been carefully recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1839 had simply vanished from the official map.
Not destroyed in any dramatic sense, just gone, absorbed into the agricultural landscape of Bramblestown in County Kilkenny, its bank and surrounding fosse levelled flat and forgotten beneath working farmland.
The enclosure was first documented on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839, where it appears as a circular feature roughly forty metres in diameter. A townland boundary, running northwest to southeast, passes immediately to its southwest, which may suggest the enclosure was already a recognised landmark when those administrative lines were drawn. By the time the map was revised between 1899 and 1902, it no longer merited a mark. What had been a legible earthwork had become invisible at ground level. The site only re-emerged, in a sense, on 15 July 1968, when an aerial photograph taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography recorded it as a cropmark, the ghostly outline of a bank and an outer fosse showing through the soil as differential growth in whatever crop was growing that summer. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as the filled-in ditches or compacted banks of ancient enclosures, affect how plants above them grow, creating patterns only visible from the air. The same photograph revealed two further enclosures nearby: another roughly circular one approximately 130 metres to the east, and the northern portion of a third some 220 metres to the southeast. Several modern field boundaries, present on the 1899 to 1902 map but subsequently levelled, also appeared as cropmarks, underlining just how much of this landscape has been quietly reshaped over the past century or so.
What the photograph captures, then, is not one isolated curiosity but a cluster of enclosures, the kind of concentration that often points to sustained early settlement or agricultural activity across a locality. Enclosures of this type are generally associated with the early medieval period in Ireland, used as ringforts or raths for farmsteads, though without excavation the precise date and function of the Bramblestown examples remain open questions.