Enclosure, Ennisnag, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ennisnag, Co. Kilkenny

In a pasture field near Ennisnag in County Kilkenny, the outline of a roughly circular enclosure sits quietly embedded in the landscape, most of its perimeter now doubled up as an ordinary field boundary.

It measures around seventy metres across, which puts it in the range of a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead built and used across Ireland from the early medieval period through to roughly the twelfth century. Ringforts typically consist of an earthen bank and ditch defining a circular space, and many survive as low, grassy rings still visible from the road. This one is less immediately legible than most.

When the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up in 1839, the enclosure was recorded as a complete, roughly circular form. By the time the map was revised in 1948, however, the eastern and south-eastern stretch of the perimeter had disappeared from the record entirely, indicating that this section of the bank had been levelled sometime in the intervening century. What remained was largely absorbed into the pattern of modern field divisions, with the surviving outer bank apparently pressed into service as a field boundary rather than preserved as a distinct earthwork. It is a common fate for monuments in actively farmed land, and it means the enclosure now reads more clearly on a historic map than it does on the ground.

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