Enclosure, Coolanure, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Coolanure, Co. Tipperary

In a paddock at Coolanure, a circular earthwork roughly thirty metres across once stood in a gentle south-eastward slope, complete enough in the early twentieth century to be mapped with its outer fosse, the ditch that typically rings such enclosures, still visible in the southern quadrant.

By the time anyone thought to record what had been lost, the enclosure was already gone, levelled by the landowner's father during the 1960s or 1970s. In the process, two headstones were uncovered and, rather than removed or reported, simply reburied. Their presence turns what might have been an ordinary ringfort into something harder to account for: a site that held burials, knowingly or otherwise, and now holds them again.

The 1903 to 1904 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map is the clearest record of what the monument looked like before it was disturbed. A ringfort of this type, a roughly circular enclosure defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch, would not have been unusual in Tipperary; such features survive in their thousands across Ireland, the remains of enclosed farmsteads dating broadly to the early medieval period. What makes the Coolanure example notable is the accumulated erasure. After the earthwork was levelled, a farm building measuring approximately nine by eighteen metres was put up over the site, aligned east to west. That building has since been removed in turn, but its rough concrete floor remains in patches, sitting on ground that had already been reshaped once before. Field boundaries recorded on the old OS maps to the north and east have also been cleared away, and a new bank raised along the eastern side, so even the surrounding landscape has been reorganised around the absence.

A faint curving scarp is still detectable in the field, possibly the last surface trace of the south-west to north-west arc of the original enclosure. The ground has been badly poached by livestock, which obscures what little topographic evidence remains. Short of excavation, the reburied headstones and whatever relationship they bore to the enclosure are unlikely to be explained.

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