Enclosure, Gotinstown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath the turf at the north-western edge of Tipperary racecourse, roughly 200 metres from the start of the five furlong run, lies an archaeological feature that has entirely ceased to exist in any visible sense.
What was once a circular enclosure, roughly 20 metres in diameter, has been levelled to the point where nothing remains above ground to suggest it was ever there.
The enclosure's existence is known primarily through cartographic evidence. The 1904 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a hachured circular area, meaning the mapmakers used short radiating lines to indicate a raised or defined earthwork, the standard convention of the period for features with some topographic presence. Enclosures of this kind in Ireland generally date from the early medieval period, serving variously as farmsteads, ecclesiastical sites, or places of assembly, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which. At Gotinstown, even that possibility is complicated by the fact that the site has since been obliterated, absorbed into the landscape of a working racecourse without leaving a surface trace.