Enclosure, Listrolin, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In the townland of Listrolin, in the south of County Kilkenny, there is an enclosure.
That spare designation, enclosure, covers a broad range of ancient earthworks in the Irish archaeological record, from the remains of ring forts and farmsteads to ceremonial or boundary structures, their original purposes often difficult to untangle after centuries of weathering and field clearance. What they share is an act of deliberate demarcation, somebody, at some point, deciding that a particular patch of ground deserved to be set apart.
Listrolin itself sits in quiet farming country, and like many such townland sites across Leinster, its enclosure survives as a scheduled monument without, for now, a great deal of published detail attached to it. The name Listrolin is of Irish origin, and the lios element, meaning a fort or enclosure, appears frequently in place names across Ireland precisely because these earthworks were so common a feature of the early medieval landscape. Whether this particular site is the one that gave the townland its name, or whether it is a separate and perhaps earlier feature, is the kind of question that further fieldwork or documentary research might eventually answer.