Enclosure, Carrickconeen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a barley field near the top of a ridge in County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that no longer exists above ground, yet was substantial enough to dominate the landscape for centuries.
The site at Carrickconeen measures roughly 53 metres in diameter, placing it in the same size range as many of Ireland's ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that once dotted the countryside in their thousands. There is now nothing to see. The ground was levelled sometime in the 1990s, and the field boundaries that once surrounded and defined the monument have also been cleared away.
What makes the story of this place legible at all is the historical mapping record. On the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, the enclosure appears as a large, roughly circular feature, set within a network of field boundaries on its north, east, and west sides, with another boundary running a short distance to the south. By the time the second edition was surveyed in 1904 to 1905, something had already begun to change: the eastern field boundary had been removed, and the monument itself, still enclosed by a bank at that point, reads as more sub-rectangular in outline. The shift in shape between editions is a small detail, but it hints at how even the act of recording a place can catch it mid-alteration, the landscape quietly reorganising itself around an older form it no longer quite recognises.
The enclosure sat on fairly level ground near the crest of a ridge, with the terrain falling gently to the west. It is the kind of position that recurs again and again with early medieval enclosed settlements in Ireland, chosen for drainage, visibility, and a modest sense of elevation without true commanding height. None of that is legible in the field today.