Enclosure, Tullohea, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullohea, Co. Tipperary

On a south-east-facing slope at the base of Slievenamon in County Tipperary, a field of ordinary pasture quietly conceals the ghost of something much older.

The land has been reclaimed and worked flat, yet subtle undulations in the turf betray the ploughed-out remains of what was once a large, roughly oval enclosure. In its south-east quadrant, a broad curving bank survives in flattened form, measuring around fourteen metres in width but rising only a few centimetres above the interior surface and less than a metre on its outer face. It is the kind of earthwork that rewards patience rather than spectacle.

The enclosure appears on both editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, first surveyed in 1840 and revised between 1901 and 1905, where it is partially traced by surviving field boundaries, a common fate for ancient earthworks absorbed gradually into the agricultural landscape. By the time of the later survey it was already being reduced, and it has since been levelled almost entirely. Enclosures of this type, broadly defined as areas of ground bounded by a bank and sometimes a ditch, served a range of purposes in early medieval Ireland, from settlement and livestock management to ritual or ceremonial use, and their exact function is not always recoverable from surface evidence alone. A ringfort, a class of circular enclosed settlement particularly common across Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, sits about 1.3 kilometres to the east, suggesting this part of the Slievenamon foothills was once a reasonably active corner of the early medieval countryside.

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