Enclosure, Lismurphy, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some monuments announce themselves with crumbling walls or earthen banks you can walk around and touch.
This one in Lismurphy, County Tipperary, offers nothing so obliging. In a field of improved pasture on a gentle south-facing slope, there is simply grass, and beneath the grass, perhaps, the ghost of something circular.
What is known comes from a single aerial photograph taken on 16 April 1974, catalogued as GSI R.438/7. From the air, a circular area of roughly 30 metres in diameter becomes faintly legible, possibly defined by a cropmark. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as ditches, walls, or pits, influence how vegetation grows above them, causing subtle differences in colour or height that are invisible at ground level but readable from altitude. On that basis, the site has been identified as a possible enclosure, the kind of roughly circular boundary that in an Irish context might once have defined a farmstead, a ritual space, or a settlement of any number of periods. The word "possible" is doing considerable work here. No excavation has confirmed the feature, and no trace of it survives above ground.
