Enclosure, Dunnstown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Enclosures
In a level field of improved pasture near Dunnstown in County Kildare, six small enclosures lie completely invisible to anyone walking the ground. No bank, ditch, or rise in the turf gives them away. The only evidence that they exist at all comes from a single aerial photograph, on which the outlines of all six appear as cropmarks, the faint discolouration that forms when buried features affect how plants grow and ripen above them, creating shadows of the past that are legible only from the air under the right conditions.
The six earthworks, each roughly rectangular in plan, are arranged in two parallel rows of three, spread across an overall area of approximately 150 metres on the northwest to southeast axis and around 100 metres across. That regularity, two neat rows within a broader rectangular footprint, hints at some deliberate organisation, though nothing in what survives above or below the surface explains what these enclosures contained, who built them, or when. Small rectangular enclosures of this kind can appear in many periods of Irish prehistory and early medieval settlement, used variously for livestock, habitation, or cultivation, but no specific date or function has been established for these particular examples.