Enclosure, Ballyphilip, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On an east-facing slope of the Slieveardagh hills in County Tipperary, there is a circular enclosure so large that a working farm now sits inside it without quite filling it.
The monument measures roughly 100 metres north to south and 90 metres east to west, making it a substantial prehistoric or early medieval feature, and yet its outline has been so thoroughly absorbed into the surrounding agricultural landscape that only a trained eye, or a close reading of old maps, would catch it at all. A field boundary cuts clean across its interior from east to west. Farm buildings occupy the northern half. What was once the southern bank has been levelled to little more than a faint rise of ground, ten centimetres high at most.
The enclosure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, already bisected by that east-to-west field boundary, suggesting the division of its interior was well underway by the time the surveyors arrived. By the 1903 edition, the southern bank had been folded into an ordinary field boundary, a quiet administrative erasure of the monument's edge. A stream once ran downhill through the southern half of the enclosure from west to east; it has since dried out, though its course is still readable in the ground. An old laneway, also visible on the 1840 map, intersects the enclosure at its western side. Some 180 metres to the south, a second possible enclosure has been identified, hinting that this part of the Slieveardagh hills may have held more significance in an earlier period than its present pastoral character would suggest.