Enclosure, Clonmorewalk, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In the improved pasture of Clonmorewalk, a low oval earthwork sits quietly in a gently sloping field, unremarkable at first glance but carrying the particular weight of something old and half-forgotten.
Locals have long called it a fort, that catch-all word applied across rural Ireland to earthworks whose original purpose has blurred with time. What survives is modest but legible: an oval enclosure roughly 21 metres across its longest axis, defined by a scarp, which is essentially a raised earthen bank or slope, and an outer fosse, a shallow ditch that once traced the full circuit of the monument.
The enclosure measures approximately 21 metres northeast to southwest and 17 metres northwest to southeast. The scarp itself stands up to 2.45 metres high and about 3.6 metres wide where it is best preserved, running from the southwest to northeast arc of the oval. Elsewhere it has been considerably reduced, standing only 0.25 metres in places. The outer fosse, 7.5 metres wide but only 0.4 metres deep, survives on the northern side; a later field boundary cutting across the south and west has destroyed or buried the rest of its circuit. That same boundary, running roughly north to south, also truncates the presumed arc of the fosse on the southwest and northwest sides. By the time the Ordnance Survey recorded this part of Tipperary for its 1904 six-inch map, the enclosure was already being shown only as a partial arc of hachures, those small hatched lines cartographers used to indicate earthen slopes and banks, suggesting the damage was well underway before the twentieth century began. The interior of the enclosure slopes gently toward the east, giving it a slight natural orientation that may or may not have mattered to whoever shaped this ground, possibly in the early medieval period, though the earthwork's date has not been firmly established.