Enclosure, Neigham, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Neigham, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath a ploughed field in Neigham, County Kilkenny, lies the ghost of an enclosure that has never been excavated, never fully described, and was not formally recorded until a researcher looked closely at a satellite image taken on a July afternoon in 2018.

The site exists, for now, only as a cropmark, the subtle differential in plant growth that reveals buried ditches and features to anyone who knows what to look for from above.

The enclosure is rectangular, measuring approximately 35 metres on its longer axis and 30 metres across, oriented roughly northwest to southeast. Jean-Charles Caillère and Simon Dowling identified it by examining Google Earth Pro imagery, and what they found has some structural complexity. Along the southeast side there appears to be a possible entrance positioned midway along the wall, and alongside it, at roughly 4 metres' distance, a parallel outer fosse, a ditch running alongside the inner one, suggesting a more defended or elaborately bounded approach than a simple enclosure would require. A fosse of this kind is a common feature of early medieval ringforts and enclosures across Ireland, though whether that is the right context here remains unknown without excavation. Adding further interest, a second rectangular enclosure sits immediately to the northwest, separated from the first by only about 3.5 metres. That second feature is less clearly defined in the imagery, but its proximity raises the possibility that the two were related, perhaps part of a single complex of activity that has since been entirely absorbed into the agricultural landscape above it.

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