Enclosure, Rosmult, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On an east-facing slope somewhere in the uplands of Rosmult, there are enclosures that exist, for most practical purposes, only as photographs.
At ground level, nothing is visible. The earthworks, possibly the remains of early settlement, have been swallowed by scrub growth, leaving the site in a strange kind of limbo: documented, mapped to a degree, yet effectively absent from the landscape a visitor would actually walk through.
What is known comes from aerial photography carried out in 1967 and again in 1974. The two sets of images, taken years apart by separate survey operations, both suggest the presence of three enclosures along with associated earthworks on the rising ground. Enclosures of this kind, typically circular or sub-circular earthen banks enclosing a domestic or agricultural space, are a familiar feature of the Irish rural past, often associated with early medieval settlement. Here, though, the identification remains tentative. The word "possible" appears deliberately: the cropmark or shadow evidence visible from the air was never confirmed at ground level, and the encroaching scrub has made any such confirmation increasingly unlikely over the decades since those flights were made.


