Enclosure, Kilderry, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilderry, Co. Kilkenny

At Kilderry in County Kilkenny, an irregularly shaped enclosure sits on the western crest of a small river valley, where rolling grasslands open out to the east.

What makes this site quietly unsettling is less what survives than what was found beneath it. Human bones were unearthed in a wide, deep trench enclosing a square area of roughly a quarter of an acre to the west of Kilderry House, and nobody has been entirely sure since what to make of them.

The enclosure itself is polygonal, a shape that tends to suggest early medieval Irish origin, when curvilinear and irregular forms were common for ecclesiastical or settlement enclosures. It is substantially eroded; the western side has vanished entirely at ground level. What remains is defined on the northern and eastern sides by a shallow scarp, rising only 0.3 to 0.4 metres, and on the southern side by a low earthen bank around five metres wide, with a stream running parallel to it just to the south. The overall dimensions are uneven: 28 metres along the northern edge, 52 metres on the east, 55 metres on the south, and just 13 metres on the northwest. Immediately to the east lie a church and graveyard, and this proximity matters. Writing in 1969, O'Kelly noted the trench and the bones but left the question open. The burials may belong to the enclosure's own history, or they may be outliers from the adjacent graveyard, spread gradually over time. The relationship between the two remains unresolved.

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