Enclosure, Kilree, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilree, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath a field at Kilree in County Kilkenny, a circular enclosure roughly forty metres across has effectively ceased to exist above ground, yet continues to make itself known.

By 1969 whatever earthwork or bank had once defined it had been levelled, most likely through agricultural improvement, and what remains is visible only as a cropmark, that faint but legible phenomenon where buried features cause overlying crops to ripen or dry out at slightly different rates, producing outlines that are invisible at ground level but readable from the air.

The enclosure appeared on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, drawn as an oval. By the 1947 revision, cartographers recorded it differently, as a square with rounded corners, with an additional unenclosed area, roughly 28 metres north-west to south-east and 24 metres north-east to south-west, indicated by a dashed line immediately to the east. Whether that shift reflects genuine change on the ground between those dates, or simply a difference in how surveyors interpreted what they saw, is not clear. Aerial photographs taken on 9 July 1969 and 14 July 1970 confirmed the levelling, but they also revealed something the earlier maps had not captured: two further enclosures nearby, one adjoining to the west, another sitting approximately seventy metres further west still. The three together suggest a more complex pattern of ancient land use than any single site would imply.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, often the remains of a ringfort, a type of defended farmstead used from the early medieval period onward, though their precise date and function can only be confirmed through excavation. At Kilree, where the physical remains have gone and the site survives only in cartographic records and cropmark photographs, the archaeology exists now largely as a problem of interpretation rather than a place to stand and observe.

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