Enclosure, Ballybur, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballybur, Co. Kilkenny

At Ballybur in County Kilkenny, a roughly oval earthwork once sat beside a small stream, its fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, partly fed by the water that ran along its edge.

Nothing of it stands above ground today. The enclosure has been levelled entirely, and the only way to perceive its former shape is through the faint discolouration it leaves in growing crops when seen from the air, the kind of cropmark that emerges in dry summers when buried features affect how plants root and draw moisture. It is a monument that survives, in the most technical sense, only as an absence.

The enclosure first appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, with a stream running roughly northwest to southeast along its southwestern edge. By the time of the 1947 OS revision, the site had been recorded in more detail: an oval area measuring approximately 68 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west, enclosed by a fosse into which water from the stream flowed at its southeastern sector. The stream running beside it is named the Blackstick, according to O'Kelly, writing in 1969. That name does not appear on most modern maps, making it one of those small pieces of local nomenclature that survives mainly in scholarly footnotes. The water-filled fosse gives the enclosure something of the character of a moated site, though no further detail about its age or original function is recorded. Satellite imagery captured in April 2011 confirmed that the cropmark outline was still legible at that point, a ghostly ellipse pressed into the soil long after the earthwork itself was gone.

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