Enclosure, Taghadoe, Co. Kildare

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Taghadoe, Co. Kildare

At Taghadoe in County Kildare, something circular is hiding beneath a farmer's field, and the only way to see it is from above. A partial cropmark, roughly thirty metres in diameter, traces the ghost of a circular enclosure in aerial imagery captured in the summer of 2018. The feature is invisible at ground level; it only becomes legible when crops growing over the buried remains respond differently to what lies beneath, producing a faint but readable outline across the field.

Cropmarks form when buried ditches or banks, long since levelled, retain moisture or nutrients in patterns that differ from the surrounding soil. The crops rooted above them grow taller or ripen at a slightly different rate, and from sufficient altitude the contrast becomes visible. In the case of the Taghadoe enclosure, the circular form suggests a ring-fort type feature, known in Irish as a ráth, which would once have served as a farmstead or enclosed settlement, probably dating to somewhere in the early medieval period. Taghadoe itself is a place of some antiquity; it takes its name from the Irish Tech Tua, the house of Saint Tua, and retains a round tower, which places it firmly in an early Christian landscape. The presence of a probable enclosure nearby is entirely consistent with that context, though the aerial evidence alone cannot confirm its date or function with certainty. The cropmark was identified from Google Earth imagery photographed on 28 June 2018.

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