Enclosure, Richardstown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Enclosures
A modern road cuts straight through the southern edge of a circular enclosure near Richardstown in County Kildare, and most drivers using it will have no idea they are crossing the ghost of something ancient. The enclosure does not announce itself with visible earthworks or signage; it exists almost entirely as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features influence the growth of overlying vegetation in ways that become legible from the air, particularly in dry summer conditions when soil moisture differences show up as contrasting tones in ripening crops or grass.
The site came to notice through aerial imagery captured on Google Earth in June 2018, which revealed the circular outline with reasonable clarity. The enclosure measures approximately 59 metres in diameter and shows what may be an entrance gap on its north-north-east side. Cropmark enclosures of this general type are common across the Irish midlands and are often interpreted as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland, or occasionally as prehistoric enclosures of ceremonial or funerary character. The presence of a possible barrow, a burial mound, visible as a further cropmark some 160 metres to the north-north-east, adds a layer of interest to the wider landscape around Richardstown, suggesting this particular stretch of Kildare may have seen sustained human activity across more than one period.
