Concentric enclosure, Curraghscarteen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Concentric enclosure, Curraghscarteen, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the pasture of an east-facing slope in County Tipperary, the ground gives away its secrets only gradually.

What looks at first like a series of low grassy ridges turns out to be a double-ringed enclosure, one circular earthwork set inside another, each defined by its own bank and outer ditch. Concentric enclosures of this kind are rare in the Irish archaeological record, and their function remains genuinely uncertain. They may represent high-status settlement sites, ceremonial spaces, or something that blurred both categories. Whatever its original purpose, the one at Curraghscarteen has been sitting quietly in gently undulating terrain, under grazing land, for a very long time.

The monument is made up of two distinct elements arranged around a shared centre. The inner enclosure measures roughly 33 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, defined by a low bank between seven and eight metres wide. The bank is modest in height, rising less than half a metre on the interior and just under a metre on the exterior, with an outer fosse, or ditch, running alongside it. Beyond the inner enclosure, a wide berm, a flat platform between the two rings, stretches some sixteen to twenty metres across before meeting the outer bank. That second bank is similarly low, though its outer face rises to just over a metre in places, and it too has an accompanying fosse. A gap of around seven metres breaks the inner bank in the north-east quadrant, with a narrower corresponding gap in the outer bank nearby, suggesting the original entrance lay on that side. Tree stumps along the outer bank in the north-west quadrant hint at more recent changes to the landscape, and modern field boundaries cut across both the eastern and southern sides of the monument, slicing through what was once a continuous circuit.

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