Ring-ditch, Ballyda, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Ballyda, Co. Kilkenny

In a field at Ballyda in County Kilkenny, something ancient lies beneath the surface, invisible to anyone walking past but legible, under the right conditions, from the air.

A circular ring-ditch roughly fifteen metres in diameter shows up as a cropmark on aerial photographs, the buried ditch betraying itself through the differential growth of crops above it. Ring-ditches of this kind are the surviving traces of prehistoric burial monuments, the circular trenches that once surrounded a central mound or flat grave. The mound itself may have eroded away entirely over the centuries, leaving only the ditch as a ghostly outline in the soil.

The site was identified on aerial photographs taken on 11 August 1996. What makes it more than an isolated curiosity is its relationship to two neighbouring features: a second ring-ditch lies approximately 63 metres to the south-west, and a third sits around 250 metres to the north-east. The spacing and alignment of all three suggest they may form part of a barrow group, a loose clustering of burial monuments that was a reasonably common practice in prehistoric Ireland. Such groupings imply that a particular landscape held significance over a long period, with successive generations returning to the same area to inter their dead or mark the ground in some commemorative way.

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