Enclosure, Kilboggan, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilboggan, Co. Kildare

In a field somewhere in the townland of Kilboggan, Co. Kildare, there is an ancient enclosure that nobody walking across the land would easily notice. No earthwork rises from the soil, no stones break the surface. The only way this site revealed itself was from the air, through the quiet language of cropmarks, those ghostly outlines that appear in dry summers when buried ditches and filled features cause overlying crops to grow at slightly different rates, tracing the shapes of long-vanished structures in shades of green and yellow visible only from above.

On 14 July 1990, Dr. Gillian Barrett was conducting an aerial photographic survey when she captured the enclosure on film. The resulting photograph shows a curvilinear enclosure, meaning roughly circular or oval in plan rather than rectilinear, defined by a fosse, which is essentially a wide ditch that would originally have formed the boundary of the site. An entrance opens to the west. Enclosures of this type are common across Ireland and are associated with a broad range of periods and uses, from early medieval ringforts serving as farmsteads to prehistoric ceremonial sites, though without ground investigation it is impossible to say which category this one belongs to. What makes the Kilboggan example quietly notable is simply that its existence depends entirely on one clear day, one flight path, and one photograph taken more than three decades ago.

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Pete F
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