Enclosure, Clashganny, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a rough upland slope in Clashganny, County Tipperary, a low oval wall curves through the grass with almost no one paying it much attention.
It is not the wall itself that makes the spot unusual, but the company it keeps: the enclosure sits just two metres from one ringfort and four metres from another, making this a tight cluster of early medieval remains in a landscape that does not immediately advertise its archaeology.
The enclosure is roughly oval, measuring 34 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, and is defined by a stone wall that has largely collapsed over time. What remains shows a crest width of about one metre, a base spread of nearly three metres, and an internal height of 0.77 metres, with the exterior face standing somewhat lower at 0.43 metres. Much of it is partially grass-covered, absorbed back into the hillside in the way that unmaintained drystone construction tends to go. A gap of 0.7 metres opens in the south-east quadrant, though this is thought to be a sheep gap rather than an original entrance, the kind of informal opening that farmers have been pushing into old walls for generations without much ceremony. Ringforts, for context, are the circular or oval enclosed farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, typically dating from roughly the fifth to the twelfth century, and they survive in their thousands across the country. What is less common is finding an enclosure of this type positioned so close to two of them on the same slope, raising quiet questions about how this particular patch of upland was organised and used by the people who once lived here.