Enclosure, Garranbeg, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Garranbeg, Co. Tipperary

Between the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland in 1840 and the revised edition produced around 1901 to 1905, an enclosure at Garranbeg in County Tipperary effectively disappeared from the map.

Not from the ground, as it turns out, but from official recognition. The cartographers of the later survey simply did not record it, most likely because the intervening decades of ploughing had worn it down to the point where it no longer read clearly in the landscape. What ploughing rarely manages to erase entirely, however, is the underlying form, and this one has survived as a low, broad earthwork on a gently south-east-facing slope of undulating Tipperary pasture.

The enclosure is circular, measuring roughly 43.6 metres across on its northeast to southwest axis. An enclosure of this kind, a roughly circular area defined by a bank and sometimes a fosse (a shallow ditch running alongside the bank), is a common feature of the Irish early medieval countryside, often associated with ringforts used as defended farmsteads. Here, the bank survives most legibly along the southwest, west, north, and northeast arcs, where it runs about ten metres wide, rising only fractionally above the interior and exterior ground levels. A possible fosse is detectable in the northern quadrant, three metres wide and around thirty centimetres deep. A secondary outer bank is faintly traceable on the eastern and east-southeast side. These are modest dimensions by any measure, the kind of earthwork that rewards careful looking rather than announcing itself. The 1840 map recorded not just this circular feature but a more irregular enclosure surrounding it, a detail that hints at a more complex site than the surviving earthwork alone would suggest.

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