Enclosure, Tooreen, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tooreen, Co. Waterford

On a north-facing valley slope in Tooreen, County Waterford, there is an enclosure roughly forty-one metres across that has no visible entrance. That detail alone gives it an air of quiet peculiarity. The grass-covered stone spread that defines its near-circular boundary, between one and a half and four metres wide depending on where you measure it, rises to almost a metre in places on the eastern and southern sides, with stone facing visible on both the interior and exterior edges. Whatever came and went from this space did so in a way that has left no obvious trace in the surviving fabric.

The enclosure sits in a landscape already dense with prehistoric activity. Roughly sixty metres to the north-east lies a ring-barrow, a low circular burial mound of a type associated broadly with the Bronze Age in Ireland. Closer to the north-north-west and due north, at around a hundred and forty-five metres distant, are two fulachta fiadh, a fulacht fiadh being a type of ancient cooking or heating site identified by its characteristic mound of fire-cracked stone, typically found near water and among the most common field monuments in the Irish countryside. The headwaters of a stream lie about a hundred and seventy metres to the north-west, which would have made the area attractive for exactly the kind of repeated, water-dependent activity these sites represent. Whether the enclosure itself is domestic, agricultural, or ceremonial in purpose remains unclear, and the absence of an entrance only deepens that uncertainty.

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Pete F
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