Enclosure, Dangan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In a meadow in County Tipperary, a low rise in the ground is all that remains of an enclosure that once had five distinct sides.
That shape alone is unusual. Most early Irish enclosures tend toward the circular or oval, the familiar form of a ringfort, so a pentagonal outline suggests either an irregular local tradition or a boundary that followed some older feature of the landscape, perhaps a bank, a watercourse, or an earlier field system long since gone.
The enclosure appears on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, drawn with five uneven sides. By the time the revised six-inch map was produced in 1907, surveyors recorded it as oval, with a stream forming its western edge. The ground itself had evidently been reworked in the intervening decades, and at some point the monument was levelled, the original banks pushed flat by agricultural activity. What survives today is a gently raised semi-circular platform, roughly 40 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west, standing only about half a metre above the surrounding field. A field boundary with a deep ditch still runs north to south along the western side, likely tracing the line of that same stream. The terrain slopes gradually southward, set in undulating ground of the kind common across this part of Tipperary.