Enclosure, Drumroe, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a west-facing hillside in County Tipperary, there is a place that appeared clearly on one map and then, by the next, had quietly ceased to exist.
The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, recorded a small roughly rectangular enclosure at Drumroe, measuring approximately 49 metres north to south and 52 metres east to west. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1907, it had been omitted entirely. The monument, whatever it once was, had been levelled.
What makes this site genuinely difficult to pin down is that its identity was uncertain even at the time of its first recording. The enclosure is only partially hachured on the 1840 map, a cartographic convention used to suggest raised or banked ground, which might hint at some antiquity. But the more likely explanations are less romantic: a small agricultural field, or possibly a quarry that was subsequently filled in. A limekiln, a small stone-built structure used to burn limestone into quicklime for fertilising fields, was marked in the south-eastern corner of the enclosure on the same early map, though no trace of it survives today. The southern boundary of the feature appears to have followed an existing road, while the northern and western sides seem to have been defined by a laneway, raising the possibility that what looked like a distinct enclosure bank was partly an illusion created by adjacent field boundaries being read together.
There is a particular category of archaeological record that is more question than answer, and this is one of them. The landscape has absorbed whatever was here, and the layers of possible meaning, ancient enclosure, working quarry, ordinary field corner with a working kiln, have all dissolved into the slope.