Enclosure, Rathneaveen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some ancient structures announce themselves with standing stones or crumbling walls.
This one in Rathneaveen, County Tipperary, makes itself known primarily through a slight darkening of the grass. The enclosure, roughly sub-circular and measuring about 17 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west, was only formally identified when an aerial photograph taken in April 1974 revealed the telltale marks that ground-level inspection had apparently not captured. That is how much of it survives: not as masonry or earthwork in any dramatic sense, but as a shadow in the turf.
What the photograph revealed, and what careful survey has since confirmed, is the ghost of a levelled bank, the kind of earthen boundary that would once have defined a small enclosed area, likely used for settlement or farming in early medieval Ireland. The bank itself now stands barely five centimetres above the surrounding ground on either side, with a width of just under five metres. Beyond it lies the trace of an outer fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, around 2.6 metres wide, which shows up most clearly between the north-east and south-west as a dark discolouration in the grass. Within the interior there is a further detail: a low, raised oval platform, roughly 8 metres by 5.25 metres, edged by a slight scarp only 15 centimetres high. Its purpose is not recorded, but such internal features in enclosures of this type are sometimes associated with the footprint of a structure, possibly a house or outbuilding, long since collapsed and absorbed into the ground.
The enclosure sits in improved undulating pasture within an existing field system, with a modern farm trackway running roughly nine metres to the north. Nothing about the immediate landscape draws particular attention to it. The visible evidence is subtle enough that knowing what to look for matters considerably; the discolouration in the grass is clearest under certain light conditions and at particular times of year when differential grass growth makes the underlying archaeology readable from the surface.