Enclosure, Kildrinagh, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kildrinagh, Co. Kilkenny

In the townland of Kildrinagh, Co. Kilkenny, a farmyard boundary does something that straight-line field division never does: it curves.

The stone wall enclosing a small roughly circular farmyard, approximately 46 metres in diameter, takes a pronounced curving kink along the townland boundary as it runs from the north-east through the east and around to the south-west. That kink is not the result of awkward terrain or a surveyor's error. It is, in all likelihood, the ghost of something older.

The evidence comes from two Ordnance Survey snapshots taken more than sixty years apart. On the first-edition six-inch map of 1839 and again on the 1900 revision, the same curving deviation appears in the townland boundary at precisely this point. The fact that the farmyard itself is roughly circular, and that the boundary follows this arc so deliberately, strongly suggests that the existing stone wall is tracing the outline of an earlier circular enclosure, perhaps a ringfort or a similarly bounded enclosure of early medieval date. Ringforts, which were typically earthen or stone-walled enclosures used as farmsteads from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, were common across Ireland, and their circular footprints have a remarkable habit of persisting in the landscape long after the original structure has been absorbed into later land use. Here, the enclosure's shape appears to have been quietly preserved, first as a field boundary, then as the wall of a working farmyard, across at least two centuries of recorded mapping.

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