Enclosure, Curraghlane, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Curraghlane, Co. Kilkenny

In the pastureland of Curraghlane, a low earthwork sits quietly in a field, its outline preserved more clearly on nineteenth-century maps than it is, perhaps, on the ground today.

What makes it quietly odd is not its age or its obscurity alone, but the way the land around it seems to have been organised with some awareness of it: two separate townland boundaries run along its edges, as though the enclosure itself was used as a convenient fixed point when those administrative lines were drawn.

The first detailed record comes from the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which shows an oval form roughly 57 metres north to south and 44 metres east to west. A townland boundary tracks along its south-eastern edge on a north-east to south-west alignment, while a second boundary curves around the south-western side, passing within about five metres of the enclosure wall. By the time the OS returned to revise the map in 1900, producing both the revised six-inch and the more detailed 25-inch edition, the outline had shifted slightly in character. The later maps record a more D-shaped plan, somewhat smaller at around 48 metres by 43 metres, with the eastern side appearing as a straight edge roughly 38 metres long. Whether that change reflects actual deterioration of the earthwork, a difference in surveying method, or simply a more careful look at the ground is impossible to say. Enclosures of this general type, roughly circular or oval ringforts defined by an earthen bank and interior space, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside, yet individually they remain poorly understood, their dates of construction and precise functions still debated.

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