Enclosure, Kilsallagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilsallagh, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a field of well-kept pasture in Kilsallagh, County Tipperary, lies a circular enclosure that has left no mark on the surface whatsoever.

No earthwork, no ridge, no depression in the turf gives it away. The only reason we know it exists at all is because it appears on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840, drawn as a circular feature roughly 35 metres across on a west-facing slope. Since that survey was completed, the land has been improved, levelled, and grazed into invisibility.

Enclosures of this general type, ringforts being the most familiar Irish variety, were a common form of rural settlement and land management in early medieval Ireland, though the specific date and function of this particular example is not recorded. What the 1840 map does show is that it was not alone: a second enclosure abutted it directly to the north, and a third sat a further 45 metres beyond that, suggesting some kind of deliberate clustering in this part of the townland. To the west of the site there is a scarp running roughly north to south, though this appears to be a natural feature following the contour of a slight rise in the ground rather than anything constructed. The relationship between that natural landform and the placement of the enclosures is suggestive, if not conclusive.

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