Enclosure, Knockeenbaun, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockeenbaun, Co. Kilkenny

On a south-west-facing slope in County Kilkenny, at around 550 feet above sea level, sits a small D-shaped earthwork that has spent the better part of two centuries being quietly absorbed by the landscape around it.

What makes this enclosure unusual is partly its shape and partly its fate: by the time Ordnance Survey revisers returned to map it in 1900, the perimeter had been absorbed into a field boundary and the interior had become wet and marshy ground. A barony and townland boundary runs along its straight eastern side, and it is possible that this administrative line actually truncated the monument, with the levelled eastern quadrant falling inside the neighbouring townland of Doorath.

A rath is a type of circular or near-circular earthen enclosure, typically of early medieval date, built as a farmstead and enclosed by one or more earthen banks and ditches. This one was known locally as the Ráithín, a diminutive form suggesting something modest in scale, and it carried a particular reputation. Writing in 1969, O'Kelly recorded that a local farmer named Thomas Hogan had kept many stories about the enclosure, specifically concerning good luck in cow-calving at the rath. Hogan was, by all accounts, firmly resolved that the site should be left undisturbed. That kind of protective attitude towards a rath was not unusual in rural Ireland, where such monuments were often associated with the supernatural or with the good favour of the land, and the determination to leave them alone could persist across generations.

By recent satellite imagery the monument is heavily overgrown with trees and scrub, its outline legible more through the historical maps than through anything visible on the ground. The hill itself looks out over a wide plain running south-westward toward Slievenaman, and whatever the enclosure once was, its position on that slope was clearly chosen with an eye to what lay below.

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