The enclosure at Leggetsrath, County Kilkenny, is different: the evidence suggests it was taken apart on purpose, its occupants methodically dismantling what they had built before walking away for good, sometime before 1400.

The site sits on the eastern floodplain of a small tributary of the river Nore, low-lying ground that shaped how the settlement was engineered from the start. The enclosure itself was subrectangular, measuring roughly 36 metres by 30, and defined on its western side by a linear ditch fitted with large sumps, essentially deep pits dug into the ditch to collect and hold excess water, a practical response to the flood risk of the surrounding land. Within that boundary, excavators found the remains of a house, a shed, a kiln, and what may have been a garden. The kiln, a small furnace structure typically used for drying grain or burning lime, sat at the south-eastern corner. The site was excavated in 2007 by archaeologists working ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road scheme, with work subsequently reported by Devine and Kealy in 2009 and by Devine in 2010. The deliberate nature of the abandonment, rather than simple decay or sudden desertion, is what sets it apart. Whether the residents were consolidating holdings elsewhere, responding to the population pressures that followed the Black Death, or acting under the direction of a landlord clearing the land, the archaeology does not say. What it does record is a community that left nothing useful behind.