Enclosure, Rathduff, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathduff, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Rathduff, County Kilkenny, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes the place worth knowing about.

A circular enclosure, roughly 36 metres in diameter, once occupied this ground; the kind of enclosed ringfort site found across Ireland, typically formed by an earthen bank and sometimes a ditch, used as a farmstead or place of habitation from the early medieval period onward. By the time satellite cameras passed over the area between 2005 and 2012, the monument had been levelled, yet its ghostly outline was still faintly legible from the air, north of a field boundary that had itself once been a road.

The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, recorded the enclosure clearly, and showed a farm roadway cutting through it on an east-north-east to west-south-west axis, which suggests the monument was already being treated as ordinary agricultural ground rather than something to be preserved. By the time the same map was revised in 1948, that roadway had been reduced to a field boundary, and only the northern half of the enclosure was indicated at all. The southern portion had effectively been erased from the cartographic record, presumably reflecting what had already happened on the ground. A townland boundary runs close to the outer edge of the western side of the enclosure, a reminder that these ancient administrative lines and the older monuments they sometimes skirt were laid down in the landscape at very different moments in time, and do not always acknowledge one another.

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