Earthwork, Clonmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beneath the flat upland pasture at Clonmore in North Tipperary, a circular earthwork sits in complete invisibility.
Nothing at ground level betrays its presence, and a road cuts straight through what was once its western arc. The enclosure exists now almost entirely as a cartographic fact rather than a physical one.
The site was recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the great mid-nineteenth-century survey that captured the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail before so much of it was altered or lost. At that time, the circular enclosure was legible enough to be drawn, though already interrupted on its western side by a road. Circular earthwork enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and typically represent the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead built and occupied largely between the early medieval period and the twelfth century. Whether this particular example was a simple agricultural enclosure or something more substantial is impossible to say from what survives, and the road that bisected it long ago removed any chance of reading it whole.
