Enclosure, Grevine, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a field in Grevine, County Kilkenny, an ancient enclosure lies almost entirely invisible to anyone walking past it.
No earthwork rises above the grass, no stones mark its circuit. What gives it away is the crop itself: in dry summers, the buried ditch, or fosse, that once defined this roughly seventy-metre-wide enclosure causes the plants above it to grow differently from those on either side, producing a faint discolouration readable only from the air. It was precisely this kind of cropmark that revealed the site on aerial photographs taken on 16 July 1971.
A fosse is simply a ditch dug into the ground, often part of an enclosure that would have been defined by a bank on its inner edge. Here, three sides of the enclosure appear relatively straight, while the southern side curves inward, giving the whole a sub-rectangular rather than perfectly geometric shape. What makes the Grevine site particularly telling is how the surrounding landscape has quietly accommodated it over the centuries. A field boundary already present on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 bends noticeably westward to avoid cutting through the monument, a small but significant gesture suggesting that whoever farmed this land in the nineteenth century still recognised the ground as in some way set apart. By the time a revised map was produced in 1947, a house had been built into the north-western angle of the enclosure, with an associated plot extending southward through its western half. The monument had become a building plot, though the older field boundary continued to respect its edges. Around fifty metres to the south, three parallel boundaries of their own run north-west to south-east for approximately 140 metres, also visible only as cropmarks, hinting at a wider pattern of early activity in the surrounding fields.