Earthwork, Drumbaun, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Drumbaun, Co. Tipperary

On the upland ground of Drumbaun in North Tipperary, there is an earthwork that cannot be seen.

It is recorded, measured, and mapped, yet anyone who walked across the site today would find nothing obvious underfoot. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, shows a large circular enclosure roughly 53 metres by 58 metres across, a structure of considerable size. At some point between that survey and the present, the visible traces disappeared entirely at ground level.

What the map captured may have been a ringfort or some related form of circular enclosure, the kind of feature that appears in enormous numbers across the Irish landscape, typically consisting of an earthen bank and ditch defining a farmstead of the early medieval period. That this one sat on elevated ground is consistent with such sites, which were often positioned to command a view across surrounding territory. Immediately to the west runs what is known locally as Cromwell's Road, a routeway whose name, whatever the true origins of its construction, reflects the way communities across Ireland attached the memory of seventeenth-century upheaval to old roads and tracks in their landscape. The proximity of a named historic routeway to a now-vanished enclosure suggests a corner of the countryside that was, at various points, genuinely busy with human activity, even if the physical evidence has since been absorbed back into the ground.

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