Building, Ballinlina, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Utility Structures
At Ballinlina in County Tipperary, a small rectangular ruin sits on a slight rise, built deliberately into the bank of an older enclosure.
That relationship between the building and the earthwork beneath it is the quietly odd detail here: whoever constructed this structure chose to use an existing boundary as part of their design, tucking the west end of the building against the enclosure's south-western bank rather than building freestanding on open ground.
What remains are the foundation walls of a limestone building, roughly eight metres east to west and four and a half metres north to south, laid in a crude lime mortar. The walls survive to a height of only fifteen to twenty centimetres, with a thickness of just under a metre, suggesting solid if modest construction. The entrance, three metres wide, was positioned at the eastern end on the south side. Loose stone collapse is visible both inside and around the eastern wall, which has fared worst of what little survives. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the large-scale mapping series produced across Ireland from the 1830s onwards, recorded the structure as a roofless rectangular building, meaning it had already lost its roof by the time cartographers passed through, though its outline was still legible enough to plot.