Enclosure, Barn Demesne, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
At Barn Demesne in County Tipperary, there is a circular enclosure that most people would walk straight across without noticing.
It exists in the ground record only as a faint scarp, roughly two and a half metres wide and about thirty centimetres high, tracing part of the eastern arc of what was once a defined boundary. The rest has been absorbed entirely into the surrounding pasture.
The enclosure was not identified through fieldwork but through an aerial photograph taken in September 2002, one of those cases where cropmarks or tonal differences in grass reveal what the eye at ground level cannot. It sits on a raised section of an east-facing slope, with mature forestry to the north and a tertiary road to the south, and it does not stand alone. A second, larger enclosure lies approximately twenty metres to the east. Circular enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most debated, features in the Irish archaeological landscape; they may represent early medieval farmsteads, often called raths or ringforts, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more. What survives here is the suggestion of an outline rather than a legible structure, a gentle earthwork that the silage field is slowly reclaiming.