Enclosure, Tullamore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some places earn their place in the historical record not by surviving but by disappearing, and the enclosure at Tullamore in County Tipperary is a case in point.
Set on flat pasture amid undulating North Tipperary countryside, it is not visible at ground level. There is, in the most literal sense, nothing to see. What remains is only the fact that something was once there, and the quietly dispiriting paper trail of how it came to be gone.
An Office of Public Works file from 1968 described the site as being of no archaeological significance, a judgement that may well have cleared the way for what followed. Shortly afterwards, a land improvement scheme in the late 1960s appears to have finished the job entirely. Enclosures of this type, which in an Irish context typically refers to a defined area bounded by an earthen bank or fosse, were once a common feature of the landscape, associated with settlement, agriculture, or ritual use across many centuries. This one left almost no account of itself before it was levelled. The 1968 assessment offers a kind of accidental record: a monument noted largely in the act of being dismissed.


