Enclosure, Cleghile, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Cleghile, Co. Tipperary

Beneath an ordinary pasture in Cleghile, County Tipperary, there is a rectangular enclosure that nobody can see.

No earthwork, no ridge, no shadow in the grass gives it away at ground level. The only evidence of its existence is a cropmark, a phenomenon that occurs when buried foundations or ditches affect the growth of vegetation above them, producing outlines legible only from the air and only under the right conditions of drought and light. In this case, that fleeting moment of visibility was captured in a single aerial photograph taken in April 1974 by the Geological Survey of Ireland.

The photograph shows what appears to be a rectangular enclosure pressing southward from a field boundary along the northern edge of a gently undulating field. Beyond that outline, very little is certain. Cropmarks can indicate enclosures of almost any period, from prehistoric farmsteads to early medieval ringforts to post-medieval field systems, and without excavation there is no way to assign this one a date or a function. What is notable is its company. Two further enclosures lie within a few hundred metres, one roughly 310 metres to the south-south-east and another around 400 metres to the south-west, suggesting that this part of Tipperary was once a more densely organised landscape than the open pasture now visible would imply.

There is nothing for a visitor to observe at the site itself. The field shows no surface trace. The enclosure exists, for now, only in that fifty-year-old photograph and in the inference that something deliberate once shaped this ground.

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Pete F
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