Enclosure (Large), Lismortagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure (Large), Lismortagh, Co. Tipperary

Most ancient enclosures announce themselves clearly enough, but the large earthwork at Lismortagh in County Tipperary is a monument that has largely retreated from view.

Potentially circular, with an estimated diameter somewhere between 100 and 140 metres, only the western to north-eastern arc of its enclosing element has ever been recorded visually, and that was from the air, in a GSI aerial photograph taken on 16 April 1974. At ground level, the rest of it has simply vanished beneath improved pasture on a south-east-facing slope.

What survives on the ground is a section through the north-west quadrant, covering roughly 50 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 58 metres north-northwest to south-southeast. Even this remnant is a study in layered earthwork construction. Working outward from the interior, there is a scarp, then a narrow fosse (a ditch, in this context cut to define and defend the enclosure's boundary), followed by a berm, which is a flat shelf of ground left between the ditch and the outer bank, and then the outer bank itself, which still stands to an external height of around 45 centimetres. The dimensions are modest by any measure, but the multi-element profile, scarp, fosse, berm, and outer bank in sequence, suggests something more deliberately engineered than a simple stock enclosure. A multivallate ring-barrow, a burial mound ringed by multiple ditches and banks, lies just 3.5 metres to the north-west, hinting at a landscape that was, at some point, quite intensively marked out and used. The monument has been further reduced by modern field boundaries cutting across it from the east and south, which accounts for much of what is no longer legible at surface level.

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