Enclosure, Toor Beg, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Toor Beg, Co. Kilkenny

On a steep west-facing slope above the Gloshia river valley in County Kilkenny, the ground holds the ghost of an enclosure that has been slowly absorbed by the farmland around it.

When the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1839, the feature was still clear enough to be recorded as a large, roughly D-shaped enclosure, measuring approximately 69 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west. By the time the 1947 revision was made, it had vanished from the map entirely, not because it had disappeared all at once, but because the landscape had quietly swallowed it.

An enclosure of this type, a substantial earthwork defined by a raised bank, would once have marked the boundary of a settlement, a farmstead, or possibly a site of ritual or administrative significance. What survives is fragmentary. The bank along the south-western sector appears to have been folded into a field boundary, continuing to perform a practical function long after its original purpose was forgotten. The western bank, also visible on the later 25-inch Ordnance Survey map, seems to have suffered a more abrupt fate, cut through or removed altogether to make way for a farm roadway. The commanding views northward, southward, and eastward along the valley suggest that wherever the enclosure sits in the long chronology of Irish field monuments, its position was not chosen carelessly.

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