Enclosure, Killurane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Killurane, Co. Tipperary

At the southern edge of Scohaboy Bog in north Tipperary, there is an enclosure that may or may not exist.

That ambiguity is not a caveat; it is rather the entire point of the place. An enclosure, in the archaeological sense, is typically a defined area bounded by a bank, ditch, or wall, often of early medieval origin, and associated with settlement, farming, or ritual activity. This particular example occupies a category of its own: a site recorded, catalogued, and yet stubbornly unverifiable on the ground.

The story of this enclosure is essentially a story of maps and bog. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the area as open bog, undifferentiated and featureless. By the second edition, surveyed around 1903, small fields appear, pushing up toward where the enclosure was thought to lie. The site was identified not through those maps but through subsequent fieldwork, by Eamon Cody and Paul Walsh, who flagged it after the initial inventory had been completed. When researchers returned to the location marked on the most recent Ordnance Survey edition, however, they could find no trace of any enclosure. The land by that point had become cut-away bog, the term for ground that has been industrially harvested for peat, leaving a stripped and altered landscape in which earlier surface features are typically lost entirely. Whether the enclosure ever clearly existed at ground level, or whether it was always marginal and faint, the bog has since made the question largely unanswerable.

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Pete F
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