Enclosure, Ennisnag, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ennisnag, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath a tillage field on a ridge in south Kilkenny, a roughly circular enclosure about 57 metres across sits effectively invisible to anyone walking past.

The earthwork was still legible on the ground when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were drawn in 1839, and it remained on the 1947 revision, but at some point after that it was levelled, most likely by agricultural activity. What the naked eye can no longer see, however, an aerial camera can still detect. A photograph taken in July 2000 caught the monument's fosse, the defensive ditch that once ringed the enclosure, as a cropmark, the kind of subtle difference in plant colour and growth rate that betrays buried features during dry summers. Satellite imagery from 2017 goes further still, suggesting a second, inner enclosure of around 30 metres in diameter nested inside the first.

Enclosures of this type are among the most common monument classes in the Irish landscape. They tend to be interpreted as the enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites of early medieval Ireland, though some have earlier origins. What makes the Ennisnag example particularly interesting is its setting within a cluster of related sites. Three other enclosures lie within 340 metres of it, on the northern and eastern sides of a small river valley that runs north to south just to the east of the ridge. One of these neighbours is considerably larger. Whether these sites were contemporary with one another, or represent different phases of activity across centuries, the notes do not say, but their concentration along a single valley suggests this was a consistently inhabited and organised piece of ground for a very long time. The M9 motorway now passes roughly 90 metres to the east, close enough that drivers crossing this part of Kilkenny are, without knowing it, skirting the edge of what was once a structured early settlement landscape.

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