Enclosure, Muckalee, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In the Douglas river valley in County Kilkenny, a circular earthwork once occupied a low-lying plot beside a small stream.
Today there is nothing to see. The ground offers no trace of it, and only by consulting an old map does the monument exist at all, briefly visible in the documentary record before vanishing from it entirely.
The first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map, published in 1839, captured the enclosure at a moment when it was still legible in the landscape. It appeared as a roughly circular inner area measuring approximately 38 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, itself contained within a more irregular outer bank or platform extending to around 58 metres by 57 metres. The western and north-western portions of that outer boundary were not clearly indicated on the map, possibly because the stream running along that side of the monument served as its natural limit, doing the work that a built bank would otherwise have done. Enclosures of this general type, a roughly circular area defined by earthen banks, are found widely across Ireland and can date from prehistory through to the early medieval period, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its six-inch mapping in 1947, the enclosure had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting it was levelled, most likely through agricultural activity, somewhere in the intervening century. It is not visible at ground level today.