Enclosure, Ballinamona, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinamona, Co. Tipperary

In a level, poorly drained field in County Tipperary, a slight rise in the ground traces the outline of a long-forgotten enclosure, visible only to those who know what they are looking at.

No walls break the skyline here, no tower or gatehouse announces an obvious history. What survives instead is a subtle conversation between earthwork and agriculture, legible mainly as a low scarp, a partly silted fosse, and a gently depressed interior, the whole thing no more than eighteen metres across at its widest point. It was not a walker or a local historian who first documented this place, but an aerial photograph taken in September 2002, the kind of overhead view that reveals cropmarks and earthwork shadows invisible from ground level.

The monument is roughly sub-circular in plan, which places it within the broad family of enclosed sites, including ring forts and related settlement enclosures, that are scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands and typically date from the early medieval period, though without excavation a precise date here is impossible to assign. A fosse, meaning a ditch dug to define and defend the perimeter, still survives in places, best preserved along the north-east to east-south-east arc and possibly also at the south-west. Elsewhere, the original form has been substantially altered by later agricultural work: the fosse was straightened and backfilled to the west-south-west, and re-cut as a drainage channel along the northern sector, a practical response to the poorly drained ground that continues to characterise the surrounding pasture. The south-east side preserves what may be an original entrance, a gap roughly five and a half metres wide at its outer edge, cut into the interior ground level and now marked by a growth of yellow flag iris, a plant that reliably colonises wet, disturbed ground. Dense briars obscure the north-western portion of the scarp, further complicating any reading of the earthwork on the ground. A second enclosure lies approximately thirty-four metres to the west, suggesting this was not an isolated feature in the landscape.

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Pete F
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