Enclosure, Burgesland, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
There is nothing to see at Burgesland now, which is precisely what makes its paper trail so interesting.
A circular enclosure that once sat on flat pastureland in County Tipperary has been entirely levelled, absorbed into the surrounding farmscape without leaving a trace above ground. It exists today only in old maps and a brief inspection report, a monument that was catalogued and then quietly erased.
The enclosure appeared on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, drawn as a roughly circular form measuring approximately 32 metres north to south and 31 metres east to west, with trees inside and a field boundary running east to west from its southern side. By the time of the second edition survey around 1904 to 1905, it was still there, still legible on the landscape. When an inspector visited in 1969, the picture was already changing. A house and yard had been built directly against the southern edge, removing that section of the bank, and the interior was choked with scrub that made it difficult to pace out. What remained of the sides stood about six feet high, nearly vertical, and was noted as looking modern in profile, with a slight fosse, the shallow outer ditch that often accompanies an enclosure of this kind. The inspector judged it probably a tree-ring, a term for a circular feature formed by the roots and growth patterns of a group of trees rather than by deliberate human construction, and on that basis it was not protected from the Land Project Works, the mid-twentieth-century state programme that funded the clearance and improvement of marginal agricultural land across Ireland. It did not survive.