Building, Grangemockler, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Utility Structures
On a south-facing slope in the Tipperary parish of Grangemockler, a low stone structure sits quietly in pasture, its walls barely breaking the surface of the grass.
The building is modest in every dimension, roughly thirteen metres from north to south and just four metres wide, yet its deliberate layout and the care with which its walls were once raised suggest it was something more than a casual field enclosure.
The structure was identified during field survey and is positioned within the north-east area of a larger enclosure. Its walls, covered over the years by sod, stand only a fraction of a metre high internally, though they reach slightly higher on the exterior side, and in places they have collapsed outward to nearly a metre and a half in width. What gives the building a slightly uncanny quality is the way its long axis runs north to south and the southern end is left entirely open, as though it was designed to face the slope rather than shelter from it. At the eastern terminus, a large erratic boulder, a glacially deposited stone left stranded far from its geological origins, has been incorporated as a natural endpoint to the wall rather than replaced by dressed stonework. A loose pile of stones lying adjacent to the east may represent material that has tumbled from the structure over time, or possibly gathered there during later agricultural clearance. A separate enclosure lies roughly three hundred metres to the west-south-west, suggesting this small building sat within a broader pattern of organised land use on this hillside.