Enclosure, Ovenstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ovenstown, Co. Kilkenny

In a field in Ovenstown, Co. Kilkenny, an oval earthwork survives in a state of gradual absorption into the landscape around it.

Measuring roughly 50 metres on its longer axis and 40 metres across, the enclosure is large enough to have once defined a significant enclosed space, though what it enclosed, and when, remains unrecorded. Enclosures of this type are among the most common but least understood monuments in the Irish countryside, variously associated with early medieval settlement, livestock management, or ritual use, their origins often impossible to pin down without excavation.

The enclosure first appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, part of the great primary mapping of Ireland that documented the country's landscape in unprecedented detail. By the time of the 1947 revision, something had already shifted. The bank along the eastern side of the monument had been replaced by a field boundary, and another field boundary was running across the bank on the opposite side. The earthwork had not disappeared, but it was being quietly dismantled by the ordinary business of farming, its edges recruited into the grid of modern landholding. What the maps together show is a monument caught at different moments of survival, useful once for enclosure in an older sense, then useful again as a ready-made boundary line.

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