Enclosure, Paulstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Paulstown, Co. Kilkenny

On the edge of Paulstown in County Kilkenny, a circular earthwork sits in a field, largely invisible to anyone walking past.

Its banks have been so thoroughly flattened over the decades that it no longer registers as a feature in the landscape at ground level, yet from satellite imagery the outline of the enclosure can still be made out, a ghost ring pressed into the earth.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, where it appeared as a roughly circular feature measuring approximately 57 metres north to south and 62 metres east to west. Circular enclosures of this kind are a common but not fully understood element of the Irish countryside; they may represent the remains of a rath or ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that was the typical unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, though without excavation the dating and function of any individual example remains uncertain. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its mapping around 1900, the enclosure had disappeared from the record entirely, suggesting it had been largely levelled sometime in the intervening sixty years. A field boundary still runs roughly east to west along the southern edge of where the enclosure once stood, which may preserve something of the original alignment even as the earthwork itself has gone.

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Pete F
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