Ring-ditch, Emly, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Emly, Co. Tipperary

Some archaeological sites announce themselves with earthworks, stone, or ruin.

This one offers nothing of the sort. Lying in gently undulating wet pasture outside Emly in County Tipperary, the feature is entirely invisible to anyone standing in the field. No raised bank, no depression, no shadow in the grass gives it away. It exists, as far as the eye is concerned, only as ordinary farmland.

What the ground conceals is a ring-ditch, a roughly circular buried feature approximately eight metres in diameter. Ring-ditches are typically the eroded or ploughed-down remains of prehistoric funerary or ritual monuments, sometimes all that survives of a round barrow whose mound has long since been levelled by centuries of agriculture. This particular example never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard cartographic record against which Irish field monuments are routinely checked. It came to light only through aerial photography, specifically Ordnance Survey photograph 2351/0, in which the circular cropmark becomes legible from above in a way the surface simply does not permit. A closely related ring-ditch sits almost adjoining it immediately to the north, suggesting the two features may have formed part of the same funerary landscape, a pairing that was equally absent from the historical maps.

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Pete F
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