Ring-ditch, Clintstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Clintstown, Co. Kilkenny

In the flat, reclaimed grassland of the Nuenna river valley in County Kilkenny, there is a circle roughly fifteen metres across that nobody walking the land would ever notice.

It exists, as far as ground-level observation is concerned, not at all. The only way it has ever been seen is from the air.

The feature is a ring-ditch, a type of circular earthwork defined by a shallow ditch, which in many Irish examples is associated with prehistoric funerary or ceremonial activity, sometimes enclosing a burial mound that has long since been ploughed flat. At Clintstown, the ring-ditch revealed itself as a cropmark on an aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1971, part of a Cambridge University collection of aerial survey images. Cropmarks form when buried features affect the growth of crops or grass above them; a buried ditch, holding more moisture, can produce a slightly lusher or differently coloured stripe of vegetation that becomes legible only from altitude and in the right conditions of light and season. The Clintstown example sits well above the Nuenna's flood plain, the river running some 260 metres to the south, and it is not alone in the landscape. Two further enclosures lie within roughly 70 metres to the north-north-west and 60 metres to the south, suggesting this quiet stretch of valley was once a good deal more structured and inhabited than its present agricultural plainness implies.

Because the ring-ditch carries no surface expression whatsoever, there is nothing to see at ground level and no particular feature to seek out on a visit. Its interest is almost entirely aerial and archival, a reminder that the Irish landscape holds a great deal that is invisible to anyone simply walking through it.

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Pete F
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