Enclosure (Large), Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Bramblestown, Co. Kilkenny

A large circular enclosure roughly 80 metres across sits beneath a ploughed field at Bramblestown in County Kilkenny, invisible to anyone walking past but legible, in the right conditions, from the sky.

It survives not as upstanding earthworks but as a cropmark, the kind of trace that appears when differential moisture and nutrients in the soil cause crops growing over buried ditches to ripen at a different rate from those around them. On a dry July day in 2018, that contrast was sharp enough to be caught in satellite imagery, and the enclosure came to light.

The site was identified by Jean-Charles Caillère and Simon Dowling working from Google Earth Pro imagery dated 14 July 2018. What they found was a slightly irregular ring with at least two concentric ditches, known as fosses, the outer one running parallel to the inner at a distance of roughly 4 metres in the north-west quadrant, then widening to about 10 metres further north before continuing south-eastward for approximately 60 metres. There is a hint that this outer fosse may curve south-westward to form an annexe attached to the eastern side of the enclosure, though the cropmark is not clear enough to confirm this. A modern field boundary cuts across the southern interior in a zig-zag line, and the southern arc of the enclosure disappears altogether where it crosses into an adjoining field planted with a different crop, which produced no readable contrast. Enclosures of this scale and complexity, particularly those with multiple ditches and possible annexes, are associated in Irish archaeology with a range of periods and functions, from later prehistoric ceremonial sites to early medieval settlement, and without excavation the Bramblestown example cannot be assigned to any one category with confidence.

The enclosure is under tillage and not accessible as a visitor site. It remains, for now, a feature known only through its aerial signature, the kind of place that exists more clearly in a satellite image than it does on the ground.

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