Enclosure, Ballylynch, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some places earn their place in the archaeological record not because they survive, but because they so thoroughly do not.
At Ballylynch, on a north-facing slope just south of the Carrick-on-Suir to Waterford road, there is nothing left to see. The front lawn of Roseville House sits quietly above a steep drop to the road below, and somewhere beneath the grass, or perhaps beneath nothing at all, a circular enclosure once existed. An enclosure in this context would typically mean a roughly ring-shaped earthwork, likely defined by a bank and ditch, of the kind built throughout Ireland from the prehistoric period into the early medieval. This one is gone.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, recorded the site clearly, showing a circular enclosure with trees growing around the bank. By the time later editions were produced, that same location was marked not as an ancient monument but as a quarry, which tells its own story. The landowner confirmed it had been used as a sand and gravel quarry, and the process of its erasure was gradual rather than sudden. Road-widening works along the route to the north, carried out between the early 1970s and the mid-1980s, resulted in the northern half of the quarry being filled in. The southern half followed roughly a decade later. Between the quarrying itself and the subsequent infilling, any remaining trace of the original earthwork was almost certainly lost. There is no visible evidence of the monument above ground, and it is considered likely that it has been completely quarried out.