Enclosure, Bennettsbridge, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Bennettsbridge, Co. Kilkenny

Nothing at ground level gives this site away.

The fields near Bennettsbridge in County Kilkenny look unremarkable from the road, and the enclosure buried beneath them has never been excavated, never been formally visited in any meaningful archaeological sense. It exists, for now, almost entirely as a smudge of tonal variation in a single aerial photograph taken on 16 July 1971, its outlines made legible only because a dry summer had stressed the crops growing above it unevenly, the buried ditches retaining slightly more moisture and producing a greener, denser stripe of growth. Cropmarks of this kind are often the only surviving trace of early enclosed settlements, the ditches having been gradually ploughed flat over centuries until nothing protrudes above the soil.

What the photograph revealed is a double enclosure, or bivallate enclosure, meaning one ring set inside another. A bivallate arrangement typically involved two concentric ditches, called fosses, dug around a central space, and here the outer enclosure measures roughly 100 metres across, with its two fosses running from south, around the west, and up to the north. In the eastern quadrant, only one fosse is visible, which may reflect how the monument was constructed or simply how well it has been preserved in different parts of the field. Inside this outer ring sits an inner enclosure of approximately 50 metres in diameter. A subtle curve on its eastern side hints at something older beneath it, an earlier, smaller enclosure that was at some point expanded outward, the new boundary absorbing the original. Two field boundaries recorded on Ordnance Survey maps from 1839 and still present on the 1947 revision have since been removed, and at least one of them cut directly through the monument. A further boundary line running roughly east to west, visible on later satellite imagery, passes through the site just south of centre.

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Pete F
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