Enclosure, Moanmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
At Moanmore in County Tipperary, a roughly D-shaped earthwork sits quietly in pasture on a gentle north-facing slope, its outlines so subtle that it was only formally identified from an Air Corps aerial photograph taken on 2 September 1959.
The enclosure measures approximately 16 metres north to south and 16.5 metres east to west, and what makes it quietly curious is the effort that evidently went into its construction: the interior has been deliberately levelled to compensate for the natural slope of the ground, and a slight terrace, around 11 metres wide, runs along the northern edge of the interior, set just 20 centimetres below the rest of the floor.
The monument is defined by a broad earthen scarp, the kind of low raised bank that marks the boundary of an enclosure, with an external flat-bottomed fosse, essentially a ditch, running around the outside from the north-east to the south-west. That fosse is best preserved along the south-east to south-west arc, becoming very shallow and hard to read further round, and disappearing entirely along the north-west to north-east stretch. Immediately to the west lies a second enclosure, and the two are divided by a notably wide north-south fosse some 6.6 metres across, which appears at some point to have been re-cut and pressed into service as a field drain, with faint traces of that drain extending outward beyond the monuments in both directions. That second enclosure also contains what may be a barrow, a burial mound, though no such feature has been identified within this one. The original entrance has not survived in any recognisable form.