Enclosure, Clintstown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
On the eastern bank of the River Nore in County Kilkenny, a large D-shaped enclosure sits quietly beside a river island, visible only from the air.
Roughly fifty metres in diameter, with a straight western side running approximately forty-five metres on a northwest to southeast axis, it is the kind of feature that registers as little more than a shadow or a subtle shift in crop colour from ground level. Its existence came to light through an aerial photograph taken in July 1989, the sort of oblique or vertical image that has revealed countless buried and semi-buried features across the Irish landscape since systematic aerial survey work began in earnest in the twentieth century.
Enclosures of this general type are among the most common yet most ambiguous monuments in Ireland. They can represent the remains of early medieval ringforts, later medieval farmsteads, or ecclesiastical enclosures, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say with confidence which. What distinguishes this one is its D-shape, a form sometimes associated with enclosures that had a natural boundary on one side, whether a river, a bank, or a field edge, making up part of their perimeter. The straight western side here, oriented northwest to southeast, may reflect exactly that logic, with the topography of the Nore's eastern bank doing some of the work that a constructed bank or ditch would otherwise have done. Its position adjacent to a river island adds another layer of interest; islands and river margins were often considered liminal or strategically useful in early Irish settlement patterns, though precisely what activity this enclosure once contained remains unknown.