Enclosure, Castlegrace, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a flat Tipperary field, divided now between meadow and barley, there is an enclosure that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.
No earthwork, no bank, no ditch. The only clue that something was ever here is a large oak tree standing at the centre of a field boundary, marking the spot where the monument once stood. The tree survived; the structure around it did not.
The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the site as a circle with trees in the interior, which suggests it may have functioned as a tree-ring, a deliberate planting of trees in a circular arrangement, often used as shelter or ornamental features on agricultural estates. Alternatively, it may have begun life as a ringfort, the type of circular earthen enclosure built in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or place of refuge, and later adapted as a tree-ring when that original purpose had long been forgotten. Castlegrace House, a Georgian property, sits roughly two hundred metres to the south-east, and the relationship between the estate and whatever use the enclosure was put to in later centuries is easy to imagine, if impossible now to confirm. The most peculiar chapter in the site's recorded history belongs to the 1930s, when, according to the landowner, the field was used as an airstrip. A vanished early medieval earthwork repurposed as a Georgian amenity, then briefly pressed into service as a landing ground, before being bisected by a field boundary and swallowed entirely by the working farmland around it.
