Enclosure, Tinnalintan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tinnalintan, Co. Kilkenny

Tucked into a cleft between two areas of high ground on the south-east bank of the Glashagal River in County Kilkenny, this small enclosure is the kind of feature that rewards slow looking.

The surrounding topography closes in on all sides, cutting off any long view, and the site itself is now so heavily overgrown with briars and saplings that its trapezoidal outline is difficult to read from the ground. What survives is a raised interior platform, roughly 10.8 metres north to south and 9.6 metres east to west on the broader southern side, ringed by a denuded earthen and stone bank and, beyond that, a wide outer fosse, a defensive ditch, approximately two metres across and dropping some 1.5 metres below field level on the southern side. The river forms the northern boundary, making a natural fourth wall in place of an earthwork.

The best-preserved stretch of bank runs from the north-east around to the south-east, while the north-west and south-west angles have worn back considerably. Notably, there is no discernible causeway across the fosse, which raises obvious questions about how the interior was ever reached. The western side of the fosse has its own curiosity: tradition held that St Finan's well was located there, at the southern end of the western fosse, and that a stream channel once ran northward from the well through the fosse and into the Glashagal River. The association of a holy well with an enclosed earthwork is not unusual in an Irish context, where early ecclesiastical and pre-Christian water sites were often folded into later landscape arrangements. Whether the enclosure itself is early medieval, later, or something else entirely remains unclear. One possibility raised is that the feature may relate to the nineteenth-century Brenan Estate, which would place it in an entirely different category of designed or functional landscape rather than an ancient one.

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Pete F
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