Earthwork, Bohernagore, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Bohernagore, Co. Tipperary

At the foot of the Knockmealdown mountains in County Tipperary, a valley floor holds a cluster of earthen enclosures that resist easy classification.

The most prominent survivor is a curving bank, roughly two metres wide and one and a half metres high, which has been absorbed into the landscape as a working field boundary, topped now with a post and wire fence. To its west, a pear-shaped enclosure sits largely consumed by gorse and ferns, its original outline still legible but only just. Two smaller enclosures once visible to the south have fared no better, equally overgrown and easy to miss entirely.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 and 1907 both depict the pear-shaped enclosure, suggesting it was a recognised feature of the landscape across at least two generations of survey work. By 1974, when the site was inspected under Office of Public Works correspondence, the description was candid about its strangeness: an unusual complex of earthen banked enclosures on the edge of a ravine slope, most with a fosse, which is a defensive ditch, running outside the embankment rather than inside, with traces of additional banking still legible. Even then, the eastern side of the large curving bank had already been bulldozed away, and the field to the east had been reclaimed for agriculture. The site sits in a ravine-edge position that feels deliberate, though precisely what purpose the complex served, and when it was constructed, remains unresolved. Aerial photography has confirmed the general layout of the earthworks, though the ground-level picture is one of progressive loss to both cultivation and vegetation.

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