Enclosure, Templemartin, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
There is something quietly disorienting about a monument you cannot see.
On a north-facing slope in Templemartin, County Kilkenny, an enclosure of modest but definite dimensions, roughly 32 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, sits in the landscape without offering the slightest visual clue to its presence. No earthwork rises above the grass, no ditch catches the eye. The place announces nothing.
What we know of it comes largely from cartographic evidence. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 recorded it as a roughly rectangular enclosure, and the 1900 revision confirmed its outline was still legible to surveyors at that time. Enclosures of this general type are a common feature of the Irish countryside, often the remains of early medieval farmsteads or settlement boundaries, defined originally by a raised bank and outer ditch. Whether anything of that kind once broke the surface here is no longer apparent. A farm road now cuts across the northern portion of the monument, and the enclosure sits immediately north of a working piggery complex, the ordinary infrastructure of agriculture pressing in from two directions. The slope itself offers reasonable views to the north-northeast and east, though rising ground closes things off elsewhere.
