Enclosure, Kilbline, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilbline, Co. Kilkenny

In the townland of Kilbline in Co. Kilkenny, a circular earthwork roughly 43 metres across was mapped in detail by Ordnance Survey cartographers in 1839, only to vanish from the revised maps compiled between 1899 and 1902.

That gap of six decades covers a period of considerable agricultural reorganisation across rural Ireland, and the enclosure appears to have been a casualty of it, levelled at some point before the turn of the twentieth century. What survives today is pasture, and the monument itself is gone.

The first-edition OS six-inch map, produced from surveys carried out around 1839, recorded the enclosure with some precision. A townland boundary curved along its southern perimeter, and a field boundary ran along the southeastern edge before turning eastward. These alignments are not coincidental: boundaries of this kind often respect older features in the landscape, bending around earthworks that were already ancient when the surveyors arrived. Roughly 20 metres to the northeast, the same map indicated a quarry of comparable size, which raises the uncomfortable possibility that the enclosure's material was simply extracted and removed. Circular enclosures of this type are typically the remains of a ringfort, a form of enclosed farmstead common in early medieval Ireland, usually defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Thousands once existed across the country; many were cleared during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as improving landlords reorganised their estates.

The curving townland boundary and the field boundary noted on the 1839 map both remain in place, tracing the ghost of a perimeter that the enclosure itself no longer holds. These residual lines in the landscape are often the only legible sign that something significant once stood nearby.

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