Enclosure, Ballyherberry, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In a field at Ballyherberry in County Tipperary, a low rectangular earthwork sits quietly among the working landscape, largely unremarked.
What makes it worth attention is not any single dramatic feature but its situation: it sits immediately beside a moated site to the east and within roughly sixty metres of a ringfort to the west. Three different categories of enclosure, from different periods and purposes, within a short walk of one another.
The enclosure itself is defined by a scarp, a low step or edge in the ground rather than a built-up bank, tracing a rough rectangle measuring approximately 48 metres on its long axis and 35 metres across. The scarp is modest in scale, between one and two metres wide and only ten to twenty centimetres high, and is disturbed at its southern angle. On the north-western side, the remains of a fosse survive, an external ditch once cut to define and defend the perimeter, now measuring around six metres wide overall and relatively shallow. The interior slopes gently toward the south-south-west, its surface slightly uneven. A raised farm road, presumably of more recent origin, cuts across the monument off-centre toward the north-east, the kind of practical intrusion that accumulates on farmed land over centuries. The neighbouring moated site to the east is a more distinctly medieval form, a type of enclosed farmstead or manor associated with Anglo-Norman settlement, typically surrounded by a water-filled ditch. Together, the two monuments suggest that this corner of Tipperary was a place people kept returning to, layering one kind of enclosure upon another across a long stretch of time.