Enclosure, Ballyconnor, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyconnor, Co. Tipperary

On the north-western slope of a hill at Ballyconnor, there is almost nothing left to see, and that near-absence is precisely what makes the place worth knowing about.

A small circular enclosure once occupied this ground, the kind of earthwork that appears across the Irish landscape in various forms, typically the remains of a ringfort or enclosed farmstead from the early medieval period. It showed clearly enough on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, a tidy circular outline on the hillside pasture, and was still legible on later editions, though a field boundary had by then clipped its western side.

Sometime in the 1940s, according to the landowner, the site was levelled. It is a fate that befell countless such monuments during the mid-twentieth century, when agricultural improvement and land consolidation were priorities and the significance of these earthworks was not widely appreciated. What survives now is a faint curving rise in the ground, a slight swelling in the pasture that preserves the ghost of the enclosure's circuit. At the northern and north-eastern edges there is a possible suggestion of an outer fosse, the shallow ditch that would originally have surrounded and defined the enclosure, though the ground in those areas has been disturbed and any reading of the topography requires some caution.

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