Mound, Loughnafina, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
About half a mile outside Cashel, during routine monitoring of a sewerage scheme in 2000, a buried mound came to light roughly thirty centimetres beneath the present ground surface.
That it was found at all is something of an accident of infrastructure; without the Cashel Sewerage Scheme and the archaeological monitoring that accompanied it, this feature would almost certainly have remained entirely unknown. What emerged was not a tidy, well-preserved earthwork but a mound that had been considerably cut into and disturbed, its western side eaten away by a series of interconnecting and overlying pits and cuts, some of them backfilled with gravel and stone.
The mound itself was built from redeposited builder clay, laid directly onto the natural subsoil, which suggests deliberate construction rather than gradual accumulation. It sits within the northern portion of what may be a circular enclosure, though the disturbed ground made it impossible to confirm whether any surrounding fosse or bank, the ditch-and-earthwork boundary typical of many early Irish enclosures, had ever existed. Along the mound's eastern edge, a well-preserved metalled surface was uncovered, a compacted, hardened layer of the kind often used for pathways or surfaces around significant features; it may have wrapped around the entire mound, though the limited trench width prevented any firm conclusion. Most strikingly, tucked within a pocket of gravel was a zoomorphic penannular brooch in excellent condition. These brooches, characterised by a ring with animal-headed terminals and a loose pin, are generally associated with early medieval Ireland, though no firm date was established for this particular example or for the mound itself. Its function remains equally open: ceremonial, funerary, domestic, all are possibilities the excavation could not resolve.