Enclosure, Killeen, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Killeen, Co. Kilkenny

Just west of a farmyard outside Kilmanagh, a broad earthen bank and ditch describe a near-square on the hillside, quietly holding their shape after what is likely well over a thousand years.

The enclosure is roughly 56 metres north to south and 54 metres east to west, with rounded corners that give it a softened, almost domestic outline. Its external fosse, a defensive ditch dug around the outer face of the bank, survives to a depth of around two metres in the southern and western sectors, which is a respectable degree of preservation for an earthwork of this kind. The whole thing sits on a west-facing slope with open views stretching north, south, and west toward the Munster River, which runs about 430 metres to the south-west.

The enclosure was already old enough to be mapped when the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets was produced in 1839, and it appears again on the 1900 revision in much the same form. Its age and original function are not recorded, but enclosures of this type in the Irish midlands and south-east are frequently associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes the remains of a ringfort or ecclesiastical precinct, sometimes a later defended farmstead. The bank stands to roughly 1.5 metres in height, though both it and the fosse are now heavily overgrown with trees and dense undergrowth, a condition noted during an archaeological impact assessment carried out by Cóilín Ó Drisceoil in 2006 in connection with a proposed housing development nearby. That assessment helped bring the site into clearer focus, even if the vegetation has since continued to do what vegetation does.

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Pete F
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