Enclosure, Johnstown, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Johnstown, Co. Kildare

What makes this earthwork quietly puzzling is not what survives but what is missing. Most early enclosures of this type, broadly comparable to the ringforts scattered across Ireland and generally thought to date from the early medieval period, are defined by a bank thrown up from a surrounding ditch, or fosse. Here, no such ditch is visible. The working interpretation is that whoever built this oval enclosure dug the material out of the interior itself, effectively hollowing the inside down while raising the perimeter up. The result is a bank of unusual width, averaging around fifteen metres across, even if its height is modest at roughly a metre above the interior ground level.

The enclosure sits at the northern end of a low pasture ridge, around eighty metres east of the Togher River, which flows northward through this part of County Kildare. Wet, rushy ground closes in from the northwest, north, and northeast, meaning the slight elevation of the ridge would have mattered to whoever chose this spot. The oval interior measures approximately thirty-one metres east to west and twenty-six metres north to south, placing it within the general size range of a small ringfort, though without excavation no date or function can be confidently assigned to it. The site was identified from aerial photography and is fairly poorly preserved on the ground.

A road running east to west clips the southern edge of the enclosure, and a fenced headland roughly eight metres wide runs parallel to it just inside the northern boundary of the road, cutting across the bank with wooden post-and-rail fencing. These modern intrusions account for some of the degradation, and a visitor approaching from the road would likely see only a low, broad swelling in the pasture rather than anything immediately legible as an ancient boundary. The breadth of the bank, though, is the detail worth pausing over.

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