Enclosure, Gaulstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gaulstown, Co. Kilkenny

At Gaulstown in County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure roughly 45 metres across was once visible enough to be mapped by Ordnance Survey cartographers working on the first edition six-inch series in 1839, and was still present when the same map was revised in 1900.

Today, satellite imagery confirms that both the enclosure and the field boundaries that once ran along its edges have been levelled entirely. What was there is now gone, leaving only the paper record of its outline.

Circular enclosures of this kind are a familiar feature of the Irish countryside, typically interpreted as the remains of ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were built and occupied across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. A diameter of around 45 metres is within the common range for such sites. The Gaulstown example had field boundaries running northwest to southeast along its northeastern edge, and another immediately outside its southeastern sector, suggesting it had been partially absorbed into the working agricultural landscape even before its final removal. That kind of gradual encroachment is a pattern seen at many levelled sites: the monument becomes a boundary, then an inconvenience, and eventually disappears into the pasture around it.

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