Enclosure, Rathclevin, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathclevin, Co. Kilkenny

In the tillage fields of Rathclevin, a large circular enclosure lies completely invisible to anyone walking across it.

No earthwork rises above the soil, no hollow marks a ditch, and nothing about the landscape surface suggests that anything out of the ordinary is buried beneath. The only evidence that this structure exists at all came from the air, captured in a single aerial photograph taken on 13 July 1966.

The photograph, reference CUCAP AOZ066, revealed what archaeologists call a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features such as ditches or banks cause the vegetation or crops above them to grow differently, producing subtle variations in colour and height that become legible from altitude. In this case, the cropmark outlines a large sub-circular enclosure roughly 66 metres in diameter. Its true shape is slightly ambiguous: it may originally have been D-shaped, or it may once have been fully circular but truncated over time by a field boundary that now runs roughly east to west along its northern edge. A second field boundary, running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east along the eastern sector, appears to have clipped the enclosure further, and the cropmark does not continue into the field to the east. Whether the D-shape reflects the enclosure's original design or simply the accumulated interference of later land division is a question the photograph alone cannot answer. Enclosures of this general type and scale in Ireland are most commonly associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation the date and function of this particular example remain entirely open.

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