What is recorded here

Fairy fort in Ballynakill, County Kildare: a worn 38-metre circle on a ridge terrace, its earthen bank no higher than a ankle and its outer ditch shallow enough for rain to erase. People may have lived there before fields and roads cut across it, but the land has kept only a suggestion. What remains is a boundary made of soil, old enough to belong to nobody and strange enough to tempt a story about fairies.

On level pasture at the W leading-edge of a broad terrace on the W slopes of a moderately steep-sided ridge. A poorly preserved circular area (int. diam. 38m) is defined by a low, broad, inner earthen bank (Wth 4-5.6m; int. H 0.2m; ext. H 0.3m) and by a shallow, outer fosse (Wth 1.8-2.4m; D 0.1-0.3m) NNE-S-NW. A modern field bank truncates the N limits which are also disturbed at NW by a modern, deep, rectangular depression (dims. L 14m E-W; Wth 5m; D 2m) running W from the enclosing elements. The site is visible on an aerial photograph (Holton 1985, Fig. 48; SMR file). Archaeological testing (Licence no. 02E0149: www.excavations.ie), carried out as part of the Kinnegad-Enfield-Kilcock Bypass (Contract 3), 50m to the S of the monument revealed no archaeological deposits. Compiled by: Gearóid Conroy Date of upload: 10 June 2011

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