Enclosure, Feathallagh, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Feathallagh, Co. Kilkenny

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with earthworks, carved stones, or at least a dip in the ground.

This enclosure in the Kilkenny townland of Feathallagh offers none of that. The field has been reclaimed, and there is nothing visible at ground level, no ridge, no hollow, no scatter of stones. What survives is essentially a cartographic ghost, an oval wooded area marked on the 1902 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, representing what was almost certainly a rath, the Irish term for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically dating from the early medieval period and used as a farmstead or place of settlement.

A second oval wooded area appears on the same map within Feathallagh townland, and the relationship between the two sites is unresolved. Either one, or possibly both, may correspond to a rath recorded by O'Kelly in 1969 as having been destroyed in 1961. That destruction, presumably through agricultural clearance, would explain the absence of any surface trace today. The 1902 map, then, is doing considerable work here: it preserves the outline of something that had already been reduced to a tree-line by the early twentieth century, and that tree-line itself has since disappeared. What remains is a record of a record, the shape of an enclosure remembered only because a surveyor once drew it.

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