Field system, Kilmore, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Field system, Kilmore, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the improved pasture of a gently south-facing slope at Kilmore in County Tipperary, a faint geometry persists in the ground.

What looks, at first glance, like ordinary agricultural land turns out to carry the levelled remnants of an earthwork system that once organised and divided the landscape in a deliberate, if now only barely legible, way. The banks are low, worn almost flush with the surrounding field, but their angles and relationships to one another suggest something more purposeful than chance: a field system, most likely, that once enclosed and connected a cluster of earthwork enclosures.

The remains consist of several low earthen banks, each reduced to modest proportions, with a width of around four metres at the base and an internal height of no more than twenty centimetres in the best-preserved stretches. The principal bank runs roughly north-north-west to south-south-east for seventy-four metres before stopping just short of one of the associated enclosures and throwing off two branches, one running sixty metres to the east and another forty-two metres to the west. A further bank extends from a second enclosure toward the south-east, linking up with an existing field boundary, while additional shorter lengths dog-leg to the west and south before terminating a couple of metres clear of the modern field edge. A separate east-west bank connects back to a third enclosure. The overall effect is of a planned layout, with the banks radiating from and between enclosures in a pattern that implies organised land use at some earlier period. Linear depressions on the western side of the field are considered likely to relate to drainage rather than to the field system itself. The enclosures the banks surround and connect have not been definitively dated, and without excavation the full sequence of activity here remains uncertain.

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