Enclosure, Connahy, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a field in Connahy, Co. Kilkenny, a rectangular enclosure once sat in the landscape, defined by a fosse, a ditch dug to mark and defend a boundary, with the suggestion of a second, outer fosse on its eastern side.
Today there is nothing to see. The enclosure has been levelled, along with all the field boundaries that once radiated from it, absorbed into the surrounding tillage. What survives is a record pieced together from maps and aerial photography, describing something that existed for long enough to be drawn, revised, and eventually erased.
The earliest cartographic evidence comes from the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, which shows an irregular, straight-sided enclosure with field boundaries extending from several of its corners and sides. By the time the OS revised that map in 1947, the feature had shifted slightly in appearance, appearing more square, with interior trees shown within its bounds. The plan dimensions recorded from a 1990 aerial photograph suggest a roughly rectangular shape, roughly 29 metres on the north-east to south-west axis and widening from about 29 metres at the eastern end to around 33 metres at the west, with an entrance oriented to the south-east. Cropmarks, the faint differential growth patterns in cereal crops that betray buried ditches and banks beneath ploughed ground, made the fosse visible from the air even after the earthwork itself had gone. Orthophotographs from 1995 and 2005 confirmed the south-east-facing entrance. The enclosure's form and the presence of a fosse place it within a broad category of enclosed settlements common across early medieval Ireland, though nothing in the surviving record pins it to a particular period or function.