Enclosure, Figlash, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Figlash, Co. Tipperary

There is a circular enclosure in the townland of Figlash, County Tipperary, that no one walking the land would ever know was there.

It sits on a gradual west-north-west-facing slope, buried beneath ordinary pasture, leaving no trace on the surface. The only reason it is known to exist at all is a single aerial photograph taken in 1973, in which the outline of an earthen bank became briefly legible from altitude, a ghostly ring approximately thirty metres across pressed into the ground.

Circular enclosures of this kind, often referred to as ringforts, are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with estimates running to tens of thousands of surviving examples. They were typically built during the early medieval period as enclosed farmsteads, defined by an earthen bank, a fosse, or a combination of both, encircling a domestic space. The Figlash example appears to have retained its earthen bank to some degree, at least as a subsurface feature, though what lies within the enclosure, and when it was constructed, remains unknown. That the bank registers on aerial photography but not at ground level suggests either significant silting and settling over the centuries or that the surrounding pasture has been levelled at some point, leaving the underlying archaeology intact but invisible.

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