Enclosure, Warrenstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Warrenstown, Co. Kilkenny

Two earthen enclosures sit on a low hilltop in the Urlingford lowlands of County Kilkenny, their outlines still legible in the landscape despite being largely swallowed by vegetation.

What makes the site quietly unusual is its paired arrangement: a northern platform of roughly 792 square metres and a smaller southern one of around 325 square metres, positioned side by side and apparently sharing a single fosse, the term for a ditch dug to define or defend an enclosure boundary, running approximately two metres wide between them.

The site was described by Barry in 1977 as a double platform site with internal banks, and recorded as very degraded and totally overgrown even at that point. The northern enclosure is roughly rectangular in plan, measuring around 31 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 25 metres across, with rounded angles softening what might otherwise read as a sharper outline on the ground. The southern enclosure is slightly larger and oriented on a different alignment, running roughly east-north-east to west-south-west, which gives the pair a slightly skewed relationship to one another rather than a neat mirrored symmetry. The shared fosse suggests the two were conceived or at least used together, though whether they represent a single phase of construction or accumulated over time is not recorded. The 25-inch Ordnance Survey map, one of the most detailed historical mapping series covering rural Ireland, captures the rectangular form clearly enough to allow modern comparison with what survives on the crest of the hill today.

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Pete F
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