Enclosure, Lughinny, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a wide valley of flat rolling grassland in County Kilkenny, there is a monument that exists only on paper.
No earthwork breaks the surface, no ring of stones catches the light at a low angle, nothing interrupts the field. Yet for over a century, cartographers recorded something here, a roughly square raised area with gently rounded corners, measuring approximately 34 metres from north-east to south-west and 33 metres from north-west to south-east. An enclosure of that kind, a defined and bounded area likely marking a settlement, farmstead, or ceremonially significant space from the early medieval period or before, would once have been a tangible presence in this landscape. Now it is gone.
The Ordnance Survey captured it twice. The first edition six-inch map, produced in 1839, shows the feature clearly enough that its outline could be traced. The 1900 revision recorded it again, this time with enough detail to give a sense of its shape and scale. Somewhere between that second mapping and the present, the ground changed. According to the landowner, the monument was levelled during the 1940s when the land was reclaimed for agricultural use, a fate that came to countless earthworks across Ireland during decades when improving marginal or uneven ground took precedence over what lay beneath it. The enclosure at Lughinny did not survive that process, and today nothing is visible at ground level.