Settlement deserted - medieval, Ballintotty, Co. Tipperary

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Settlement Sites

Settlement deserted – medieval, Ballintotty, Co. Tipperary

On an east-facing slope in County Tipperary, where a river runs along the base of the hillside, a medieval settlement once occupied a rocky outcrop at Ballintotty.

Nothing of it survives at ground level today, no banks, no ditches, no trace of the community that once gathered here. The land has quietly reclaimed whatever arrangement of buildings and enclosures once constituted a functioning town.

The place surfaces briefly in the historical record through a 1618 entry in the Patent Roll of James I, which refers to "the castle, town and lands of Ballintote" as part of the estate of Morogh Mc Rory Roe O'Kennedy. The O'Kennedys were a Gaelic Irish dynasty with deep roots in Ormond, the territory covering much of what is now Tipperary, and the mention of a castle, town, and lands together suggests this was once a place of some local consequence. That the reference appears in a Jacobean patent roll also points to the wider upheaval of the period, when land ownership across Ireland was being formalised, transferred, or confirmed under the Crown following the collapse of the old Gaelic order. A tower house, the kind of fortified residential structure common across late medieval Ireland, remains associated with the site, though the earthworks one might expect to find surrounding it, the banks and ditches that typically mark out a deserted settlement, have left no visible impression on the ground.

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Pete F
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