Ring-ditch, Ballynagrana, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Ballynagrana, Co. Tipperary

In a gently undulating pasture in County Tipperary, a prehistoric feature sits beneath your feet without announcing itself in any way.

There is nothing to see at ground level, no earthwork, no mound, no visible boundary of any kind. The only evidence that anything is here at all comes from the air, specifically from a Bruff Survey aerial photograph that captured the faint outline of a roughly circular enclosure approximately six metres in diameter on a slight south-west-facing slope.

A ring-ditch is generally understood to be the remains of a circular ditch, often all that survives of a burial monument after centuries of ploughing and erosion have levelled the original mound above it. What makes this particular example quietly arresting is that it never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard historical cartographic record for rural Ireland. It passed unrecorded through every mapped survey of the landscape until aerial photography revealed it. More striking still is the company it keeps. Two further ring-ditches lie within close range on the same slope, one roughly fifteen metres to the north-east and another about a hundred and twenty-five metres to the south-west, suggesting that this small, featureless field in Ballynagrana once formed part of a more deliberate funerary or ceremonial landscape, however unreadable that landscape has since become.

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Pete F
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