Concentric enclosure, Brittas, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a north-facing hillside near Brittas in County Tipperary, a circular earthwork has been erased from the landscape but not entirely from it.
Around 1990, the enclosure and all the field boundaries surrounding it were levelled, most likely during agricultural improvement works. Yet the ground itself retains a memory of what stood there: a slight scarp, no more than about 0.4 metres high, still traces the enclosure's outline, an oval roughly 39.6 metres north to south and 34.6 metres east to west. Before it was flattened, the earthen bank that defined the enclosure rose to a maximum height of around 1.5 metres above the surrounding exterior ground, enough to have made it a conspicuous feature on the hillside.
The monument was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and again on the revised edition of 1901 to 1905, and it was still clearly upstanding when captured in an Air Corps aerial photograph taken before its destruction. A curving field boundary that once lay approximately 25 metres to the north is now also gone, though its relationship to the enclosure is not straightforward; it may have been a later agricultural boundary that happened to follow the curve of the earthwork, or it may represent an outer line of defence, suggesting the whole feature was once more elaborate than the surviving scarp implies. A field boundary that bisected the enclosure from north to south was also removed at the same time. Concentric enclosures of this type, where multiple circular banks or ditches are arranged around a central area, are known from the Irish landscape in various forms, some associated with settlement, others with ritual or territorial functions, and the precise origins of the Brittas example remain unclear.
The faint outline is still visible under grass to anyone who knows where to look, and the disturbed ground at the edge of the south-east quadrant adds a further layer of uncertainty to what the site may once have contained. What survives today is less a monument than a topographic whisper, legible mainly in low, raking light.
