Enclosure, Connahy, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
Beneath the soil on the eastern slope of a hill in Connahy, Co. Kilkenny, lies the ghost of a circular enclosure that nobody walking the ground would ever know was there.
It leaves no trace above the surface; no earthwork, no raised bank, no depression underfoot. Its existence is known almost entirely from the air, where the buried remains of a wide, deep fosse, the kind of defensive ditch typically dug around a settlement or enclosure, betray themselves through differential crop growth. Plants rooted above a filled ditch draw on different moisture and nutrients than those in the surrounding undisturbed soil, and in the right season and light, that difference reads as a faint but legible mark across a field.
Aerial photography taken in 1971 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography captured the enclosure as a cropmark, and a later photograph confirmed the outline. What emerged from those images is a roughly circular form approximately forty metres in diameter, sitting on the eastern face of a steep hill that rises from a valley floor, with the land climbing further to the west and long views opening out to the north and south. The positioning is typical of early enclosures in Ireland, many of which were sited with an eye to visibility and defensibility. Whether the fosse once surrounded a ringfort, a small settlement, or some other enclosed space is not recorded, but the scale and form are consistent with the kinds of sites that were in use across Ireland from the early medieval period onward.