Enclosure, Esker, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
On the western side of the Dinin river valley in County Kilkenny, there is a scheduled monument that no longer announces itself in any visible way.
An enclosure once occupied a gentle rise in rolling grassland, positioned to command good views to the east and south, with the Dinin river winding roughly 130 metres to the west. Today, the field boundaries in the vicinity have been cleared and the monument levelled entirely. You could walk across it without the faintest suspicion that anything was ever there.
The enclosure, roughly 34 metres on its northwest-to-southeast axis and about 28 metres across, was sub-square in plan, with straight or slightly curving sides and rounded corners to the north and east, a shape that suggests it was once a defined and deliberate space, possibly a farmstead enclosure of the early medieval period, though nothing in what survives above ground confirms a date. Its outline is preserved only on the 25-inch Ordnance Survey map, which recorded Ireland's landscape in remarkable detail during the late nineteenth century. Even that cartographic trace is incomplete: the southwest side and the southern and western corners were cut through at some point by a field boundary running northwest to southeast, so the original form was already compromised before the monument was finally levelled altogether. A public road now runs immediately to the southeast, parallel to what was once the enclosure's southeastern side, suggesting the modern infrastructure and the older landscape feature have long existed in close proximity, though not always comfortably.