Field system, Oldtown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Oldtown, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath the farmland at Oldtown in County Kilkenny, the faint geometry of an ancient landscape persists, invisible at ground level but legible from the air.

Aerial photographs taken in July and August 1996 revealed cropmarks, the differential ripening of crops over buried features, that trace the fosse, or defensive ditch, of a circular enclosure with an east-facing entrance. Running to the northwest of that enclosure, faint linear fosses suggest the boundaries of an associated field system, their alignment running broadly northeast to southwest across the terrain.

What makes the site particularly interesting is that it does not stand alone. Approximately 200 metres to the northwest, a second cropmark enclosure appears, and it too seems to have its own field system attached. Whether the two field systems are independent of one another or whether they form parts of a single, larger agricultural layout running across the area remains unclear; the evidence from the aerial photographs does not resolve it definitively. This kind of ambiguity is common with cropmark archaeology, where the marks visible in a dry summer give enough information to identify that something is there, but not always enough to explain exactly what. Circular enclosures of this type are a well-documented feature of the Irish countryside, typically associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation the date and function of these particular examples cannot be confirmed. What the paired enclosures and their associated field boundaries do suggest is that this corner of Kilkenny was once a structured, organised landscape, shaped by people who farmed and lived here in a way that left its imprint deep enough in the soil to survive, at least as shadow, into the present.

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Pete F
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