Enclosure, Clonamery, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In the quiet townland of Clonamery, in the rolling countryside of County Kilkenny, there lies an enclosure that has been formally recorded as an archaeological monument but whose details remain, for now, largely out of public reach.
Enclosures of this kind are among the most common yet most varied features in the Irish landscape. The term covers a broad range of earthworks, from the circular banks of a ringfort, which would have enclosed a farming household in the early medieval period, to the ditched boundaries of ecclesiastical settlements, burial grounds, or prehistoric habitation sites. Without further detail it is difficult to say precisely what function this particular example served, which is itself a small part of what makes it worth pausing over.
Clonamery is a townland situated along the Nore valley, a stretch of Kilkenny that has been inhabited since prehistory and which contains numerous traces of early Christian and medieval activity. The presence of a recorded enclosure here fits into a broader pattern of monument density in the region, where field boundaries, earthen banks, and ditches frequently preserve the outlines of earlier land use across many centuries. The enclosure at Clonamery has been catalogued as part of the national monuments record, meaning it was identified and noted by surveyors at some point, even if the full documentation has yet to be made publicly available.