Enclosure, Baronsland, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Enclosures
On the brow of a north-facing slope in Baronsland, County Kilkenny, a large oval enclosure sits largely invisible to the naked eye, its banks long since ploughed flat by centuries of arable farming.
What was once a substantial earthwork, roughly 72 metres north to south and 66 metres east to west, now survives as little more than a low remnant of bank in the south-western sector, rising no more than 0.4 metres from the surrounding field. The only reliable confirmation of its true extent comes not from walking the land but from looking down at it: satellite imagery captured in August 2015 reveals the monument's fosse, a surrounding ditch approximately 5 metres wide, as a cropmark, the buried archaeology subtly influencing how plants grow above it and showing up as a ghostly outline from altitude.
The enclosure was already being recorded in cartographic form by the mid-nineteenth century, appearing on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and again on the revision carried out between 1899 and 1902. At that time it was mapped as an oval defined by a bank, an outer bank, and the fosse between them, the classic layered arrangement of an enclosed settlement or ceremonial site of early medieval type. A curving field boundary along the south-east to south-west perimeter may well preserve the line of the outer bank, absorbed quietly into the working landscape without anyone necessarily marking the fact. Local tradition connects the site to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, though no surface trace of such a feature remains.