Concentric enclosure, Cooleagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Cooleagh, Co. Tipperary

What survives in a field in Cooleagh is not one enclosure but two, one wrapped around the other, a concentric arrangement that sets this monument apart from the more familiar single-ringed earthworks scattered across the Irish countryside.

The site sits on a gentle south-east-facing slope amid rolling pasture, and though the south-west and east quadrants are heavily overgrown with scrub and brambles, the underlying structure is still legible in the land itself.

The monument is built on a considerable scale. At its core is a circular area roughly twenty to thirty metres across, defined by a broad, round-topped bank nearly twelve metres wide. Beyond that bank lies a fosse, a deliberate ditch cut to channel and define, then a wide berm of approximately twenty-three metres before the outer bank and a second fosse complete the circuit. The inner fosse, between the two banks, is most clearly preserved in the east quadrant, where the ground has not been as disturbed. At some point a drain was cut through the south-east quadrant, slicing across the monument's geometry, though this appears to be agricultural rather than ancient in origin. The enclosure appears on both the first and the most recent editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps under the same form, which confirms its long continuity in the landscape record, and an aerial photograph taken in 1974 shows it clearly from above, the concentric rings legible as pale crop-marks or earthwork shadows against the surrounding ground.

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Pete F
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