Enclosure, Rathkyle, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
On the western slopes of the Gloshia river valley in County Kilkenny, there is a front garden and driveway where an ancient enclosure used to be.
The site is not marked, not visible, and not particularly easy to imagine. What once measured roughly 35 metres along its north-south axis and 23 metres across, an oval earthwork of the kind that might once have enclosed a farmstead or a structure of some social significance, has been absorbed so thoroughly into the modern landscape that by 1987, when the site was visited, nothing remained at ground level to suggest anything had ever been there.
The enclosure first appears on the earliest Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1839, which records it as an oval feature with its northern portion already clipped by a road. That truncation suggests the enclosure was already losing ground to infrastructure before Victoria had been queen for two years. By the time of the 1947 revision, the shape was still legible as a field boundary, the earthwork itself perhaps reduced to a slight rise or a change in vegetation that a farmer had simply decided to respect, or found convenient to follow. The 25-inch Ordnance Survey map adds one further detail: a limekiln, a small stone structure used for burning limestone to produce agricultural lime, sat just outside the enclosure's north-western edge. Kilns like this were commonplace in rural Ireland from the seventeenth century onward, used to improve acid soils, and their presence beside an older feature is not unusual. What the map cannot tell us is how much of the enclosure was already gone by the time anyone thought to note the kiln.
A house now sits on or just outside the southern edge of what the 1839 map recorded. The levelled ground that forms its garden is, in all likelihood, the enclosure itself. The valley views that would have made this a reasonable place to settle, whether in the early medieval period or much earlier, remain. The enclosure does not.