Field system, Jamestown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Invisible to anyone walking past, a complex of ancient fields near Jamestown in County Tipperary reveals itself only from above, etched into the soil as cropmarks, the subtle colour and growth differences in vegetation that betray buried features beneath the surface.
What the eye cannot catch on the ground, satellite imagery makes legible: a roughly L-shaped curvilinear enclosure containing a number of smaller fields or paddocks, its outline defined by fosses, which are ditches, likely dug to demarcate boundaries and manage livestock or land use in an earlier era.
The enclosure is substantial in scale. The northern arm runs approximately 80 metres northeast to southwest and about 20 metres northwest to southeast, while the western portion extends around 100 metres before tapering toward the south. The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, who spotted it on satellite imagery, a reminder that significant archaeological discoveries are still being made not through excavation but through careful observation of publicly available aerial and satellite data. The field system does not sit in isolation. A moated site, a type of enclosed medieval farmstead typically surrounded by a water-filled ditch, lies roughly 70 metres to the north, and a second, smaller field system is visible as a cropmark approximately 50 metres to the southwest. Together, they suggest a broader pattern of organised agricultural and domestic activity in this part of Tipperary, the full extent and date of which has yet to be established through ground investigation.