Enclosure, Mountgale, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mountgale, Co. Kilkenny

On a hilltop in County Kilkenny, just east of the summit at Mountgale, the landscape holds what may be the ghost of a long-vanished enclosure.

Nothing dramatic marks the spot; no wall, no ditch, no obvious earthwork survives above ground. What remains is subtler: a faint circular outline roughly forty metres in diameter, just visible on satellite imagery, suggesting something once stood here that has since been levelled almost entirely flat.

The earliest documentary trace appears on the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map of 1839, produced under the Office of Public Works, where an enclosure was pencilled in at this location. Pencilled notations of this kind often indicated features the surveyors observed or were told about but could not fully verify, placing the site in a category of things already uncertain even in the mid-nineteenth century. More telling, perhaps, is the behaviour of the boundaries around it. A field boundary runs northeast to southwest immediately to the north of the site, and the townland boundary along the eastern edge kinks inward at the southeast in a way that may reflect the original curve of the enclosure's perimeter. Boundaries in the Irish landscape have a long memory; they often preserve the shapes of earlier structures long after those structures themselves have disappeared, simply because landowners and administrators continued to respect lines that were already there.

Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland, ranging from ring forts used as defended farmsteads in the early medieval period to enclosures of much earlier or later date whose function is harder to pin down. Without excavation, the Mountgale example cannot be dated or interpreted with any confidence. What the satellite outline and the old map together suggest is that something was once deliberately constructed here, on a hilltop position that would have commanded views of the surrounding countryside, and that the land has since absorbed it almost without trace.

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