Enclosure, Minorstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Minorstown, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a tilled field on a broad hilltop in County Tipperary, three circular enclosures sit joined together, invisible to anyone walking the ground above them.

The one that concerns us here, roughly thirty metres in diameter, is the most easterly of the trio, and it exists, as far as most people are concerned, only as a shadow.

The site came to light not through excavation or fieldwork but through an aerial photograph taken in 1996. What the camera caught was a cropmark, the faint discolouration that appears in growing crops when buried features below the topsoil cause slight differences in moisture retention or plant growth. In certain light and from sufficient height, circular enclosures that have been completely ploughed away can leave these ghostly outlines, legible from the air but leaving no trace whatsoever at ground level. This particular enclosure is the middle sibling in a group of three conjoined rings, with a larger enclosure to its west and a smaller one to the northwest, all clustered within a few metres of one another on the same gently rolling summit. Such groupings of conjoined or adjoining enclosures are not unusual in the Irish landscape; they may represent settlement complexes, farmsteads, or ritual spaces from the early medieval period, though without excavation it is impossible to say more than that.

There is nothing to see here on foot. The field shows no depression, no raised bank, no worked stone. The entire complex survives only as a record of what aerial photography can recover from a landscape that has otherwise moved on.

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Pete F
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