Enclosure, Clashganny, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Clashganny, Co. Tipperary

High on the south-western slopes of Barrancullia in the Knockmealdown mountains, heather is slowly reclaiming the outline of an ancient oval enclosure.

The rubble stone wall that once defined it, built with sandstone boulders and measuring nearly twenty-nine metres across at its widest east-to-west point, has largely fallen in on itself. Where it has collapsed on the downslope side, the spread of tumbled stone now extends some nine metres outward from the original wall line, a quiet illustration of how gravity and time work on unattended stonework across upland boggy terrain.

What makes this enclosure particularly worth pausing over is that it does not stand alone. In 1996, Diarmuid O'Keeffe identified a substantial complex of related features in the surrounding landscape, including multiple enclosures, hut sites, a possible ring-cairn, a field system, and clearance cairns. Clearance cairns are exactly what they sound like: small heaped mounds of stone gathered from ground that was once being prepared or maintained for agricultural use, the accumulated evidence of people methodically moving rock out of the way. Several of these cairns cluster around the enclosure, one sitting roughly eighteen metres to the north-east, another about fourteen metres to the north, and at least four more within ten to twenty metres to the north-north-west. The enclosure wall itself shows signs of having been added to in its north-western quadrant, most likely through later field clearance activity, meaning the structure carries layers of use from different periods. A probable entrance, about 1.7 metres wide, opens in the western quadrant, and the interior of the enclosure slopes away toward the south-west.

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Pete F
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