Enclosure, Wallstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Wallstown, Co. Kilkenny

A road that bends for no obvious reason is often the most honest kind of historical document.

On a plateau between valleys near Wallstown in County Kilkenny, a public road running roughly east to west makes a small but deliberate-looking kink as it passes a patch of reclaimed grassland. The most likely explanation is that it was curving around something, and that something was a sub-rectangular enclosure roughly 48 metres across its longer axis, sitting on a slight natural rise with open views in every direction. The enclosure itself is now gone, levelled by 1987, and there is nothing at ground level to suggest it ever existed.

The site appears clearly on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and again on the 1900 revision, which places it firmly in the landscape for at least the better part of the nineteenth century. Enclosures of this kind, roughly rectangular or sub-rectangular and occupying elevated ground, are a recurring feature of the Irish countryside; they may have served as farmsteads, enclosures for livestock, or the boundaries of earlier settlement, though without excavation the specific purpose of any individual example is difficult to determine. What can be said is that whoever laid out the local road was apparently unwilling, or perhaps simply accustomed, to cutting straight through it. That kind of deference tends to outlast the thing being deferred to, and so the kink in the road survives while the earthwork does not. The enclosure now shows up only as a cropmark, a faint discolouration in the vegetation visible on satellite imagery from 2012 and 2018, where the buried remains affect the growth of crops or grass above them in a way the eye can read from altitude but not from the ground.

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