Enclosure, Tinnascart, Co. Waterford

On a north-facing slope at Tinnascart in County Waterford, there is an earthwork that nobody has been able to fully explain. It was recorded on the 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a D-shaped enclosure, and that cartographic moment is essentially the extent of its formal biography. No excavation has taken place, no entrance has been identified, and the question of what it actually was remains open.

What survives today is the western portion of the original structure, the eastern side having been cut away by a field bank running north to south. The remaining section measures roughly 25 metres north to south and 16 metres east to west, and it is defined by a sequence of three concentric earthen banks separated by flat-bottomed ditches, known as fosses or berms. The innermost bank is the most substantial, standing around 1.2 metres high and retaining traces of stone-facing on its interior side. The two outer banks are lower and less well-preserved, with the outermost surviving only along the south-western to northern arc. The original enclosure, before the field bank truncated it, would have measured approximately 40 metres by 30 metres. The multiple-bank arrangement is unusual; a straightforward ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead common across early medieval Ireland, would not typically present this kind of layered profile. The possibility that it was instead a barrow, a burial mound of prehistoric date, has been raised, though without excavation that remains speculative. The site is overgrown, which makes reading the earthworks on the ground more difficult, but also means the banks themselves have been left largely undisturbed.