Enclosure, Kilmog, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilmog, Co. Kilkenny

At Kilmog in County Kilkenny, a roughly circular earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its outline old enough to have been mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1839 and largely unchanged in its basic shape since.

What makes it worth noting is partly the structure itself and partly what was pressing against it even then: a quarry immediately to the north, already eating towards the edge of the monument at the time of the first survey.

The enclosure, as recorded on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map, appears sub-circular, a shape common to early Irish ringforts, which were typically enclosed farmsteads or settlement sites dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. A fosse is a defensive or boundary ditch dug around such an enclosure, and here the outer fosse is notably wide, bringing the total diameter of the monument to around 56 metres, with the interior measuring approximately 38 metres across. The later 25-inch map adds more detail: a field boundary running north to south along the outer edge of the fosse from the north-north-east around to the south-east, and a narrow linear field to the north-west whose southern boundary extends westward from the enclosure's north-west quadrant. These field arrangements suggest the monument had already been absorbed into the working agricultural landscape by the nineteenth century, its ancient ditch repurposed as a convenient boundary line.

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