Enclosure, Seskin, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Seskin, Co. Kilkenny

A circular earthwork sitting on a flat valley floor in County Kilkenny pastureland might easily be mistaken for a rath, the familiar ring-fort of early medieval Ireland.

This one, roughly thirty metres across and ringed by a low bank, is something rather different. Locally it has long been known as the Killeen, from the Irish cillín, meaning little church, and the ground within it served as a burial place for adults until around 1770. Today there are no headstones, no visible grave-cuts, nothing to suggest the generations interred here. The field has quietly absorbed its own history.

The Killeen's church was already gone by the time the scholar William Carrigan surveyed the area in 1905, though his account, published that year, preserves details that would otherwise have vanished entirely. He described a small quadrangular building, approximately 8.5 metres long and 6 metres wide, that had once stood towards the south of the enclosure. A mound of stone rubble, tree-covered and partly swelled by field clearance over the years, still marks what is likely its position in the south-west quadrant. The west gable was indicated in Carrigan's time by a large ash tree, some 4.5 metres in circumference at its base, standing guard, as he put it, over a well-nigh forgotten city of the dead. The tradition he recorded was that the church had been parochial, serving the surrounding community, but that it was abandoned many centuries before his visit when a new parish church was established at Aharney. The site never recovered its function; once Aharney took precedence, the old killeen gradually fell silent and then fell apart.

The enclosure sits on a valley floor with open views in all directions and a stream running about forty metres to the west. At ground level, the low earthen bank is the most legible feature remaining, wide enough to trace as you walk the perimeter, though not dramatic by any measure. The rubble mound in the south-west rewards a closer look, and the ash tree, or whatever remains of it, still serves as the most direct marker of where the west gable once stood.

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Pete F
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