Enclosure, Gaulstown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a Kilkenny valley there is an ancient enclosure that no longer exists, at least not in any form the eye can find.
The oval earthwork that once sat on the floor of this valley near Gaulstown, measuring roughly 35 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, is gone at ground level. You could walk across it without the faintest impression that anything lay beneath your feet.
The enclosure's disappearance can be traced with some precision. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, records it clearly. By the time the revision was made around 1900, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely, meaning it was levelled somewhere in the intervening six decades, most likely as part of the agricultural improvement and land reclamation that reshaped so much of lowland Ireland during that period. A field boundary erected during that same window, running roughly northwest to southeast, was built directly through the southern portion of the enclosure, as though the earthwork's outline had already ceased to matter. A second enclosure of similar character once stood about 30 metres to the south; it too has been levelled, now lying quietly on the far side of that same Victorian-era field boundary. Enclosures of this kind, oval or roughly circular earthworks defined by banks and ditches, were common features of the Irish landscape from the early medieval period and earlier, serving as farmsteads, assembly points, or places with ritual significance depending on their age and context.
