Enclosure, Outrath, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a field in Outrath, County Kilkenny, there is an enclosure that cannot be seen from the ground at all.
No earthwork survives, no bank or ditch rises above the grass. The only evidence that something circular once existed here is a faint pattern visible from the air, where buried archaeology disturbs the soil moisture and growth rate of crops above it just enough to leave a ghostly outline in summer aerial photographs.
The enclosure was identified from a cropmark photograph taken on 9 July 1964, as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. What the image reveals is a roughly circular fosse, the term for a defensive or enclosing ditch, with a diameter of approximately 60 metres. A modern field boundary runs through the site from north-north-west to south-south-east, cutting directly across the centre of what would have been the enclosed space. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, records a small semi-circular gravel pit in the north-eastern quadrant of the enclosure, measuring roughly 30 metres by 15 metres, which appears to extend eastward from that same field boundary. Whether the gravel pit disturbed earlier deposits, or was simply dug without any knowledge that a prehistoric or early historic enclosure lay beneath, is not recorded. The same aerial photograph also captured a series of linear ditches nearby, possibly the remnants of a field system associated with the enclosure itself.
