Enclosure, Connahy, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a field near Connahy in County Kilkenny, there is a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across that cannot be seen at ground level at all.
It exists, at least to modern eyes, only as a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried ditches or walls cause the vegetation above them to grow differently from the surrounding soil, producing ghostly outlines that become visible only from the air, and only under the right conditions.
The enclosure came to light in aerial photographs taken on 2 August 1996. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and often indicate early medieval settlement, the remains of a ráth or ringfort where a farming family once lived within a bank and ditch boundary. Whether this particular example is prehistoric, early medieval, or something else entirely remains unknown. The cropmark gives away the shape but nothing of the story behind it, and without excavation the ground holds its silence.