Enclosure, Castlewaller, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On reclaimed grassland in the uplands above the Small River valley in County Tipperary, a circular earthwork roughly seventeen metres across sits largely invisible to anyone passing through the landscape on foot.
It is the kind of site that only reveals itself from above, its outline emerging faintly in aerial and satellite imagery, the buried geometry of an older world pressing just barely through the modern surface.
The circular feature, identified from Digital Globe aerial imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, has the proportions typical of a ringfort, the most common field monument type in Ireland, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. Whether that is what this particular example represents remains uncertain, since the site has not been excavated and its date is unknown. What complicates the picture further is the presence of two additional features nearby. Immediately to the north-east, a rectangular outline measuring approximately forty metres by seventeen metres is visible on later satellite imagery from 2018, though this may belong to a different period entirely, possibly a post-1700 landscaping feature associated with the demesne of Castle Waller, a tower house or fortified residence located around 345 metres to the east. Demesne lands were the privately managed agricultural grounds attached to a landowner's residence, and formal or functional enclosures within them were not uncommon after 1700. A third element, a curving cropmark of what appears to be a ditch, is visible in a field to the west and may be related to the other features. Cropmarks appear when buried ditches or banks affect the growth of surface vegetation, making them readable in dry summers or from altitude even when nothing is visible at ground level. Whether these three elements form parts of a single complex or represent the overlapping traces of different periods of activity has yet to be established.