Enclosure, Lismoynan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Two ancient enclosures sit side by side on a west-facing slope at Lismoynan in County Tipperary, their boundaries so thoroughly merged over time that by the early twentieth century cartographers were mapping them as a single feature.
The southerly one is roughly square, measuring about 24 metres in each direction, and despite centuries of agricultural improvement its earthworks survive in places with surprising clarity. On the western arc, an outer bank, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and a scarp (an artificially cut slope) are all still legible in the ground, the bank reaching nearly a metre and a half in height on its interior face. Elsewhere, particularly to the south and east, the remains are considerably more worn, reduced to shallow ridges that a casual eye might miss entirely.
What makes the site quietly peculiar is the relationship between the two enclosures. Where they adjoin along their shared northern edge, the usual boundary features simply disappear. There is no scarp, no ditch, no bank to separate them; the ground runs level and unbroken between the two monuments as though whoever built or used them never intended a division at that point. The fosse in the north-western quadrant appears to have been deliberately quarried at some stage, removing material and further complicating the picture. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, shows a large curving section of the western bank belonging to both enclosures as distinct from one another; by the revised edition of 1903 to 1904, the draughtsmen had concluded they were dealing with one monument rather than two. Whether that reflects a change in the landscape between those dates, or simply a different surveyor drawing a different conclusion from the same ambiguous ground, is not recorded.