Linear earthwork, Jenkinstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Linear earthwork, Jenkinstown, Co. Kilkenny

There is a feature in the pasture fields near Jenkinstown, County Kilkenny, that you could walk across without knowing it was there.

Two parallel ditches, spaced roughly twenty metres apart and running for around fifty metres in a southwesterly direction, leave no impression whatsoever on the ground surface. The only reason anyone knows they exist is because a pair of aerial photographs, taken on 10 July 1973, caught them as cropmarks, the faint differential in how vegetation grows above buried features that can make invisible archaeology briefly legible from the air.

The ditches extend outward from the southern edge of a trivallate ringfort, meaning a ringfort enclosed by three concentric banks and ditches rather than the more usual single circuit. Such a monument would already have commanded some attention in the early medieval landscape, and these linear earthworks projecting from it suggest a more elaborate arrangement of the surrounding space than the ringfort alone implies. The site sits on the south-eastern edge of a terrace above the flood plain, about 170 metres north of the Dinin River, with the land rising gently to the north and north-west. The southernmost of the two ditches appears to continue beyond the point where the other ends, giving it a total traced length of approximately eighty metres. What purpose this corridor or boundary served, whether it guided movement, defined an enclosure, or marked some social or agricultural boundary associated with the ringfort, remains an open question.

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Pete F
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