Field system, Deerpark, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ritual/Ceremonial
A field that looks, to the naked eye, like any other patch of tillage in County Kilkenny turns out, from the air, to be something else entirely.
Captured in an aerial photograph taken on 12 July 1999, the ground at Deerpark betrays the faint geometry of an ancient landscape, one that has been quietly ploughed over but never quite erased.
The photograph reveals a series of cropmarks, the subtle tonal variations in growing crops that indicate buried features beneath the soil. Crops tend to grow more vigorously over filled-in ditches, where moisture is retained, and more weakly over buried walls or compacted surfaces, producing patterns that only become legible from altitude. At Deerpark, two linear fosses, that is, ditches or trenches, extend northwestward for at least 55 metres from the northwestern side of a rectilinear enclosure. A further suggestion of two more fosses runs southeastward from the opposite side of the same enclosure for around 40 metres. Together, these alignments point to an organised field system associated with the enclosure, a planned working landscape rather than a natural accident of topography. Within the enclosure itself, a dark green cropmark hints at internal structures, possibly a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly built in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge. The enclosure, the field boundaries, and the possible souterrain appear to form a coherent complex, the remnants of a settlement and its surrounding agricultural ground.
