Enclosure, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny

Near Clomantagh in County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure roughly 45 metres across lies completely invisible at ground level, revealed only from the air as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly impression that shows up in aerial photographs when buried ditches affect how grass or grain grows above them.

What the camera captured was not one ditch but two, concentric rings cut into the earth long ago and now readable only as faint differences in vegetation colour during dry summers.

The site was identified from aerial photograph GB89.Z.02, which shows the double-fossed outline of the enclosure with reasonable clarity. A fosse is simply a ditch, typically dug as a boundary or defensive feature, and the presence of two concentric examples here suggests something more deliberately enclosed than a simple field boundary. Immediately to the south lies a ring-ditch, a circular trench that in Irish archaeology often marks the remains of a prehistoric burial monument, its original mound long since ploughed away. Whether the two features are contemporary, or simply neighbours across different periods, is not known from the available evidence, but their proximity gives the area a layered, quiet significance.

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Pete F
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