Enclosure, Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

In the pastureland outside Tullaroan, a prehistoric enclosure has been quietly disappearing for the better part of two centuries.

What was once a substantial oval earthwork, measuring roughly 68 metres along its longer axis and 51 metres across, is now, by all appearances, gone entirely. Satellite imagery shows no visible trace. The ground has been levelled, the monument absorbed into the working landscape of a County Kilkenny farm.

The enclosure was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1839, which captured the Irish countryside in considerable detail at a moment before intensive agricultural improvement had altered much of it. By the time the OS returned for its 1900 revision, only the south-western sector of the earthwork was still legible on the ground. That sixty-year interval tells a familiar story: land being brought more fully into productive use, boundaries rationalised, inconvenient lumps of earth removed or gradually worn down by livestock and tillage. A field boundary along the northern edge of the monument, now a farm roadway running north-east to south-west, is likely all that survives of the enclosure's original outline, the earthwork's former edge reused and hardened into something more immediately practical. Enclosures of this kind, broadly circular or oval ringworks defined by a bank and ditch, are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, associated variously with early medieval settlement, pastoral management, or earlier prehistoric activity, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which applies in any given case.

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Pete F
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