Enclosure, Reviewfields, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
Beneath the tilled fields of Reviewfields in County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure roughly fifty metres across lies essentially invisible to anyone walking past.
It leaves no upstanding wall, no obvious earthwork, no marker. What betrays it is the crop itself: in dry summers, the buried ditch, or fosse, that once defined this enclosure causes the plants above it to grow differently from their neighbours, producing a shadow readable only from the air. Aerial photographs taken in August 1996 caught exactly this effect, preserving the geometry of a site that the plough has otherwise erased from the landscape.
A fosse is simply a ditch, typically dug to define and defend a settlement or enclosure, with the upcast soil often forming a bank on the inner side. The Reviewfields example is circular, which places it broadly within a tradition of enclosed farmsteads or ringforts common across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, though without excavation the date and precise function of this particular site cannot be confirmed. What makes the aerial photographs especially interesting is a second feature: a concentric fosse visible in the north to north-east sector, running roughly twenty-five to thirty metres out from the inner enclosure. Whether this represents a separate outer enclosure or belongs to an associated field system is not resolved. A further cropmark nearby traces a large, roughly rectangular field system extending northeastward from the inner enclosure, suggesting that whatever activity once took place here, it had an organised agricultural dimension extending well beyond the enclosure itself.
The site sits in land that has been under tillage, meaning it is actively farmed and not accessible as a monument in any conventional sense. Its existence is known almost entirely through those aerial photographs, which captured a brief seasonal window in which the buried past made itself legible.
