Settlement cluster, Kyleballynamoe, Co. Kilkenny

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Settlement Sites

Settlement cluster, Kyleballynamoe, Co. Kilkenny

In the fields of Kyleballynamoe, County Kilkenny, a settlement once left enough of a mark on the land that local memory preserved its name long after the ground itself had been cleared: 'Tatterstreet'.

The name suggests something that persisted in the landscape as a kind of ragged remnant, a place where people had lived and moved along a hollow-road, which is a sunken trackway worn down over generations of foot and animal traffic, flanked in this case by earthen banks and raised platforms that would once have indicated the presence of structures or enclosures.

By the time a field inspection was carried out in 1987, the site had already been lost to agricultural reclamation. The field had been ploughed and levelled, and no earthworks remained visible at ground level. What survives is essentially the memory of the place rather than the place itself, passed on through local knowledge that recorded both the distinctive placename and the character of what had stood there. Settlement clusters of this kind, informal groupings of dwellings and associated earthworks, are scattered across the Irish countryside and often represent post-medieval or early modern occupation, communities whose physical traces were always modest and therefore especially vulnerable to later land improvement. The particular combination of a hollow-road with banks and platforms points to a site that was lived in and travelled through over a considerable period, even if nothing now breaks the surface to show it.

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Pete F
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