Enclosure, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In the farmland around Clomantagh in County Kilkenny, a field boundary bisects what was once a single curved earthwork, leaving one half visible only as a cropmark and the other as a patch of uneven ground on the opposite side of the fence.
The two halves no longer look like they belong together, which is precisely what makes the site easy to overlook and, in a quieter way, rather interesting.
The enclosure is known almost entirely through aerial photography. A photograph designated GB89.Z.08 reveals a curvilinear cropmark, the ghostly outline of an arc that does not fully close. Cropmarks of this kind appear when buried or collapsed features, such as the ditches that once defined a circular or oval enclosure, affect how crops grow above them. Soil above a filled-in ditch tends to retain more moisture, producing a slightly lusher or taller strip of vegetation that becomes visible from the air in dry conditions. The incomplete arc visible in the photograph is not simply a ruin but a structure interrupted, its other portion surviving as disturbed ground on the far side of a modern field boundary. That boundary, running across the footprint of the enclosure, is itself a kind of accidental archive, preserving in its rough and uneven margin the trace of an earthwork that would otherwise be entirely invisible at ground level.