Enclosure, Lisnalea, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisnalea, Co. Kilkenny

On a narrow ridge between two valleys in County Kilkenny, there is a feature that appears on one historic map and vanishes entirely from the next.

A small oval enclosure, roughly 17 metres north to south and 21 metres east to west, was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839. By the time the 1900 revision was made, it was gone from the cartography and, as things stand, gone from the ground too. Nothing is visible at surface level today.

The enclosure sat on the south-eastern side of a low hillock at the top of this NW-SE ridge, in what is now reclaimed grassland. Its absence from the 1900 OS revision points to deliberate levelling sometime in the intervening six decades, most likely as agricultural improvement work pressed further into marginal upland ground during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Enclosures of this kind, typically circular or oval earthworks defined by a bank and ditch, are a common feature of the Irish early medieval landscape, often associated with settlement or land management, though without excavation it is difficult to say more about the function or date of this particular example. What the ridge still offers, even without a visible earthwork, is the same commanding position that presumably made the site worth enclosing in the first place: wide views in every direction across the Kilkenny countryside.

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