Enclosure, Rosegreen, Co. Tipperary

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Rosegreen, Co. Tipperary

A semi-circular bank in a Tipperary pasture is not the kind of thing that announces itself.

The ground simply rises and falls a little more deliberately than the surrounding grass, a low earthen rim tracing an arc across the field that a casual walker might not register at all. Yet this slight corrugation in the landscape near Rosegreen is the surviving outline of an enclosure, its interior and exterior faces still measurable, still holding their shape after what may be many centuries of agricultural use.

The site came to official attention during a field inspection in January 2007. The enclosure is semi-circular in plan, measuring roughly 28 metres on its longer north-northeast to south-southwest axis and about 10 metres across. Its defining feature is a levelled bank, wider than it is tall, rising approximately 35 centimetres on the interior side and 70 centimetres on the exterior. The asymmetry of those two heights is a detail worth pausing on: it suggests the bank was deliberately built up on the outer face, the way an enclosure intended to define or defend a bounded space might be. The whole thing has long since been absorbed into the surrounding pasture. Sixteen metres to the west-southwest lies a ringwork, a type of medieval defensive earthwork consisting of a circular or oval bank and ditch enclosing a central area, and the proximity of the two features to one another hints that this part of the landscape was once more intensively organised than it appears today. Further undulations to the south may represent additional earthworks, though their nature remains uncertain.

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Pete F
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