Earthwork, Cloghmartin, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Cloghmartin, Co. Tipperary

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with towers or earthen banks you can walk around.

This one in Cloghmartin, in North Tipperary, does the opposite: it has essentially vanished. What makes it quietly interesting is precisely that absence, and the faint traces left behind by a place that was once legible enough to be mapped and recorded, but has since been absorbed back into ordinary farmland.

The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1843, shows an irregular-shaped enclosure on a gentle north-west-facing slope, with what appears to be a quarry feature inside it. By the time fieldwork caught up with the map, the land had been reclaimed for pasture. The enclosure itself is no longer visible at ground level. What remains is an oval depression measuring roughly 20 metres by 10 metres, which may be the filled-in remnant of that internal quarry. There is also a north-south field boundary to the east of the site that kicks out slightly from its expected line, a small deviation that could indicate the boundary was laid out with some awareness of, or respect for, whatever was still present on the ground at the time. That kind of indirect evidence, a field edge bending around something it no longer quite acknowledges, is often how vanished sites leave their mark on a landscape.

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