Enclosure, Rathclogh, Co. Kilkenny

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathclogh, Co. Kilkenny

There is nothing left to see at Rathclogh, and yet the site refuses to disappear entirely.

A circular earthwork that once occupied this patch of County Kilkenny farmland was physically levelled in 1961 during reclamation work, but the ground beneath has a longer memory than the machinery that disturbed it. In dry summers, when crops grow unevenly over buried ditches and compacted soil, the enclosure reappears as a cropmark, a ghost outline pressed faintly into the fields above.

The monument had already been losing definition for some time before it was cleared away. On the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839, it is only faintly indicated, suggesting that even by the early nineteenth century the earthwork was already reduced or partially obscured. A later revision from 1947 shows a clearer outline, but within fourteen years it was gone. Aerial photographs taken in 1971 and again in 1989, however, tell a more detailed story. The images reveal not a simple single-ditched ring but a more complex structure: a levelled bank with an external fosse, and beyond that a second concentric fosse running parallel to the first, with roughly ten metres of ground separating the two. The overall diameter of the whole complex measures approximately fifty metres. A fosse, in this context, is simply a ditch, typically cut to define or defend a boundary. The concentric arrangement here, two ditches set concentrically around a central raised area, suggests something more carefully planned than a basic farmstead enclosure, though what exactly the site was used for remains unrecorded.

The 1971 aerial photograph was taken on 16 July, and the 1989 one on 22 July, midsummer conditions when soil moisture differences show up most clearly in ripening crops. That seasonal visibility is now the only way this enclosure asserts its presence.

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