Enclosure, Parkmore, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
In a Kilkenny tillage field, a circular enclosure that once sat visibly on a small hill has been so thoroughly flattened that you would walk right across it without knowing.
The earthworks are gone, but the monument has not entirely disappeared; it survives as a cropmark, a ghostly outline that only becomes legible from the air, when variations in soil moisture and crop growth betray the buried ditches beneath the surface.
The site was already being mapped in 1839, when the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets recorded a circular enclosure on the hillock, along with a pond roughly thirty metres to the north, measuring approximately seventy metres northwest to southeast and forty-five metres northeast to southwest. By the time the OS revised the same sheet in 1947, that pond had apparently been drained, with trees shown growing within its former extent. Sometime between 1947 and 1963, the enclosure itself was levelled, most likely as part of agricultural improvement. An aerial photograph taken on 22 July 1963 already showed it only as a cropmark, meaning the earthworks had been removed within that sixteen-year window. The underlying structure, a roughly circular enclosure with an internal diameter of around forty-five metres and an overall diameter of about sixty metres, was ringed by a fosse, the term for a surrounding ditch that is the defining feature of this class of monument. A possible entrance is suggested in the east-southeast sector. More recent satellite imagery has confirmed the cropmark remains clearly legible, meaning the fosse and bank, though no longer visible at ground level, continue to influence what grows above them.
