Enclosure, Newtown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Newtown, Co. Tipperary

On the south-eastern slopes of Slievenamuck mountain in County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that nobody has ever actually seen from the ground.

It exists, as far as can be determined, only in an aerial photograph, a single frame from an Air Corps survey that caught the outline of something half-buried in brambles, ferns, gorse, and deadwood on the western edge of a steep mountain stream gorge.

The photograph revealed what appears to be a D-shaped enclosure, a form common in early medieval Ireland, where a roughly circular or oval area was defined by a bank and ditch and used variously as a farmstead, a place of ritual, or a defended residence. Here, the gorge itself may have served as the eastern boundary, the natural drop of the land doing the work that a constructed earthwork would otherwise provide. Whether the enclosure was built to take advantage of that edge, or whether the gorge and the structure simply happen to share a border, cannot be said. The undergrowth has seen to it that no ground-level inspection has confirmed what the aerial view suggested.

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Pete F
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