Earthwork, Newtowndrangan, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Earthwork, Newtowndrangan, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a gently rolling pasture in County Tipperary lies a monument that has effectively vanished twice: once from the landscape, and once from the maps.

A roughly circular earthwork, about ten metres across, was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, but by the time surveyors returned for the revised edition in 1904, it had been omitted entirely. Today, nothing is visible at ground level at all.

The site sits on a north-east-facing slope in an area of uneven, hummocky ground near Newtowndrangan, the kind of terrain that can preserve ancient features simply because it was never worth levelling. What exactly the earthwork represents is unclear, but it does not sit in isolation. Two bowl-barrows, a type of low, rounded burial mound common in the Bronze Age, lie within about 130 metres to the north-east and east. A possible enclosure was also identified roughly 83 metres to the south-east. The cluster suggests this corner of Tipperary was once a place of some significance, its monuments now worn almost to nothing by centuries of grazing and agricultural adjustment. A field boundary that once ran east to west along the southern edge of the monument, visible on both the 1840 and 1904 maps, has since been removed as well, erasing one more layer of the landscape's legibility.

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Pete F
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