Enclosure, Mortlestown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Mortlestown, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the improved pasture of Mortlestown, on an east-facing slope in County Tipperary, lies a circular enclosure that has not been visible at ground level for a very long time.

It exists, as far as any visitor would be concerned, only as a fact recorded elsewhere, the kind of place that rewards those interested in what farmland conceals rather than what it displays.

The enclosure came to light through an aerial photograph taken on 10 May 2003, on which it appeared as a circular cropmark, the faint but legible signature that buried or levelled earthworks leave on growing vegetation when soil moisture and crop stress differ slightly over buried features. Cropmarks of this kind are among the most reliable tools for detecting sites that have been smoothed away by centuries of agriculture. What the photograph also showed was that this enclosure is conjoined to a second enclosure immediately to the east, suggesting the two formed a related complex, perhaps a settlement with an attached stock enclosure or secondary compound. Adding further interest to the immediate landscape is a ringfort located roughly 100 metres to the north-west. A ringfort is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically dating to the early medieval period and associated with a farmstead or family group, and this one's proximity raises questions about the relationship between all three features. Whether they were broadly contemporary, or whether one preceded the others by centuries, is not something the aerial photograph alone can resolve.

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Pete F
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