Enclosure, Behamore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a gently rounded rise in a pasture field near Behamore in North Tipperary, an enclosure lies completely invisible at ground level.
Local tradition remembers the spot as the site of a fort, the kind of informal designation that tends to attach itself to earthworks of early medieval origin, the remains of a roughly circular or oval banked enclosure that once marked out a defended farmstead or homestead. That the landscape still holds the memory of something significant, even when there is nothing to see, is itself a quietly telling detail.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, recorded the site as a subrectangular enclosure, its northern edge cut across by a trackway. The fact that a man-made route had already bitten into the monument by the time cartographers came to map it suggests the enclosure was in a degraded state well before the modern era. Over subsequent generations, agricultural use appears to have reduced it further, to the point where the raised ground on which it sits is the only remaining surface trace. The site appears in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien and published in 2002, which places it within the broader pattern of enclosed settlements that once defined the rural landscape of this part of the country.
For anyone who does pass through the area, the site offers a particular kind of experience, one that requires imagination rather than observation. The slight circular rise in the field is the thing to look for, the ground itself preserving an outline that maps and local memory have kept alive long after the banks and ditches that gave the place its shape have gone.



