Enclosure, Bannixtown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Bannixtown, Co. Tipperary

A roughly circular earthwork sits in pastureland on a gentle east-facing slope in Bannixtown, County Tipperary, and what makes it quietly worth attention is the degree to which its internal geometry still works.

The interior drops away from the enclosing bank on all sides, creating a bowl-like depression that remains noticeably deep and sheltered, an effect amplified by the relatively substantial height of the bank as measured from within. Long grass, nettles, and briars across the eastern half have colonised the space, but they do nothing to diminish the sense of a deliberately engineered hollow.

The enclosure measures approximately 26 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west, making it a near-perfect circle. Its flat-topped earthen bank reaches around 2.1 metres in height when measured from the outside, and sits above a fosse, the broad ditch that typically accompanies such earthworks, running around the circuit. That fosse, roughly 7.2 metres wide overall and nearly a metre deep, becomes waterlogged in places along the east and south-east arc, and its northern stretch has been disrupted by infilling over time. Beyond the fosse, traces of an outer bank survive along the east, south, and west sides, though intermittently and in poor condition. In several sections to the west and north, this outer bank has slumped or been pushed into the fosse itself, while at the south-west it has consolidated into something resembling a causeway. The main bank is breached in two places, a gap of 4.5 metres at the north and a narrower one of 3 metres at the south-east, likely indicating original entrance points. A second enclosure of the same general type lies around 160 metres to the north-west, suggesting this part of Tipperary was once a more densely organised landscape than its current pastoral quiet implies.

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