Enclosure, Lissadober, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On the valley floor near Lissadober in County Tipperary, a circular earthwork roughly fifty metres across lies almost entirely beneath pasture, detectable to the naked eye only as a very low, broad bank in its north-western arc.
It does not appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, nor on the revised edition of 1901 to 1905, meaning it passed unrecorded through the great age of Irish cartographic survey. Its existence as a monument came to light only on 19 July 1970, when aerial photography revealed it as a circular cropmark, the kind of shadow-trace left in ripening crops or parched grass when buried features alter the growth of vegetation above them.
The enclosure belongs to a broad category of circular earthworks found widely across Ireland, many of them associated with early medieval settlement and farming, though without excavation the date and function of any individual example cannot be confirmed. What remains visible today is modest: the north-western quadrant retains a bank that slopes gradually over about eight metres down to the exterior ground level. A field bank running north to south bisects the eastern quadrant, cutting across whatever symmetry the monument once had, and a drinking trough now sits on top of the surviving bank in the northern section, just west of that field boundary. The rest of the circuit has been absorbed into the surrounding landscape and cannot be traced.
