Enclosure, Foulkscourt, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
A monument that no longer exists above ground can still tell a story, and the enclosure at Foulkscourt in County Kilkenny is a quiet example of how much can vanish in the space of a few decades.
Sitting on a low, flat-topped ridge in gently undulating pasture, the site offers wide views in every direction, including a clear sightline to the round tower of Grangefertagh roughly two kilometres to the north-north-east. That visibility was presumably part of the point. Yet there is nothing to see at ground level today.
The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1839, recorded a double enclosure here: a circular inner enclosure of around twenty-two metres in diameter set within a larger, roughly triangular outer enclosure measuring approximately forty-two metres east to west and sixty metres north to south, broader at the northern end and tapering to a point at the south. Enclosures of this kind, which appear widely across the Irish landscape, were often used as enclosed farmsteads or places of local significance in the early medieval period, though the function of this particular example is not recorded. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised the same map around 1900, the monument had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely. It had been levelled sometime in those intervening sixty years, likely through agricultural clearance. A road running roughly north-west to south-east had already bitten into the northern portion of the outer enclosure before that process was complete. What the 1839 surveyor carefully traced is now detectable only through the earlier map itself, and perhaps, on the right day with the right light, as a faint trace in the grass of a field that has long since moved on.