Ring-ditch, Dunmore, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Dunmore, Co. Kilkenny

In a tillage field near Dunmore in County Kilkenny, something ancient lies just beneath the surface, invisible to anyone walking past but legible from the air.

A ring-ditch roughly ten metres in diameter shows up as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried ditches or banks cause the plants growing above them to ripen or wither at a slightly different rate than their neighbours, tracing the shape of the original feature in subtle variations of colour across a field. The effect is fleeting and seasonal, dependent on dry spells and the right stage of crop growth, which is why aerial photography has become one of the primary tools for locating such sites.

This particular ring-ditch was first captured on an aerial photograph taken on 13 August 1994, and later confirmed through satellite imagery from 2018. Ring-ditches of this kind are generally understood to be the ploughed-down remnants of Bronze Age burial mounds, the circular ditch having once surrounded a central mound that centuries of agriculture have since levelled entirely. What makes this site more intriguing is its context: some twenty metres to the north-east, a considerably larger enclosure of around thirty-five metres in diameter has been identified through the same cropmark evidence. The proximity of the two features suggests this corner of Kilkenny may have once formed part of a more substantial ceremonial or funerary landscape, now compressed into the soil beneath an ordinary working field.

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