Enclosure, Caddlestown, Co. Tipperary

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Caddlestown, Co. Tipperary

A road runs straight through the middle of an ancient enclosure near Caddlestown in County Tipperary, splitting what was once a roughly circular earthwork into two unequal halves.

It is the kind of thing that passes unnoticed by most people driving past, yet the geometry of the original monument, nearly fifty metres across, is still legible in the landscape if you know to look for it.

The enclosure survives as two separate arcs of earthwork, one on each side of the road. An enclosure of this type would originally have consisted of a raised bank, or scarp, with a fosse, essentially a ditch, running around the outside, the whole arrangement enclosing a defined interior space. On the northern side of the road, the surviving arc measures roughly fifteen metres north to south and thirty-seven metres east to west, with the scarp still reaching about sixty centimetres in height and the outer fosse retaining a depth of around forty-five centimetres. The southern half is larger but more damaged, spanning approximately twenty-five metres north to south and the full forty-nine metres east to west, though the scarp here has been reduced to a height of only twenty centimetres and the fosse is correspondingly shallower. A field boundary running north to south has further truncated the eastern edge. The original circle, had it survived intact, would have measured close to forty-eight by forty-nine metres. A separate earthwork site has been recorded approximately four hundred and ninety metres to the southeast, suggesting this part of Tipperary held some significance in the early medieval or prehistoric period, though the precise date and function of the Caddlestown enclosure has not been established from the available evidence.

The monument sits in pasture on level ground, which is likely part of why it has endured at all, agricultural improvement on flat arable land tends to erase earthworks more thoroughly than grazing does. The two arcs are low and unspectacular up close, but the fosse on the northern side in particular remains reasonably well defined, and tracing the curve of the scarp from one side of the road to the other gives a clear sense of the monument's original scale.

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