Enclosure, Killeen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
Beneath a field of reclaimed pasture in Killeen, Co. Kilkenny, an old enclosure has effectively vanished, at least to the naked eye.
Nothing rises above the grass to mark where it once stood, no bank, no ditch, no trace that would prompt a passing walker to pause. And yet something of it persists, legible only to those who know where to look.
The earliest Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland, the six-inch series completed around 1839, recorded the enclosure clearly enough: an irregularly shaped, roughly six-sided structure measuring approximately 38 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and around 35 metres across. Enclosures of this kind, broadly circular or polygonal earthworks that once defined farmsteads, ritual spaces, or areas of agricultural activity, were common features of the Irish countryside through much of the early medieval period. By the time the OS returned to revise its maps at the turn of the twentieth century, between 1900 and 1901, the monument had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting it had been levelled in the intervening decades, most likely as farmland was brought into more intensive use. What remains, curiously, is a kink in a farm roadway running roughly east to west along the southern edge of where the enclosure once stood. Roads and trackways in rural Ireland frequently preserve the ghost of older boundaries in exactly this way, bending around something that is no longer there, as if the landscape has not quite caught up with itself.