Enclosure, Ballydrehid, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath the garden of an ordinary bungalow in Ballydrehid, County Tipperary, lies the ghost of a circular enclosure that no one living nearby has any memory of.
It cannot be seen from the ground. It does not feature in local folklore as a fort or a fairy ring or any of the other names that tend to accumulate around such features in the Irish countryside. It exists, essentially, as a shape revealed only from the air.
The enclosure came to light through a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried archaeological features influence the growth of vegetation above them, making walls, ditches, or filled pits briefly legible in the colour and height of grass or grain when viewed from altitude. An aerial photograph taken on 16 April 1974 showed a roughly circular form approximately 24 metres in diameter in the garden southeast of a bungalow built around 1930. The landowner, when consulted, noted no tradition of a fort on the land, though he did point to a separate small concave enclosure just east of the garden boundary, once marked out by a ring of trees, which has since disappeared from the landscape. The two features sit close together, which may or may not be coincidence.
There is little a visitor could usefully observe here. The enclosure leaves no trace at ground level, and its significance lies less in what can be experienced on the spot than in what it suggests about the density of buried activity across an Irish countryside that often looks, on the surface, entirely unremarkable.