Embanked enclosure, Drumwood, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In a flat, marshy corner of County Tipperary, a large oval earthwork sits quietly in the landscape, its interior waterlogged and colonised by flag irises, its outer bank broad enough to walk along.
What makes it unusual is less its age, which remains unconfirmed, than its physical peculiarity: the bank slopes inward rather than outward, creating a bowl-like depression at the centre rather than the raised platform you might expect. There is no fosse, the defensive ditch that typically accompanies enclosed earthworks of this kind, which sets it apart from the ringforts so common across Ireland and raises questions about what the enclosure was actually for.
The earthwork is substantial. Its oval footprint measures roughly 77.6 metres north to south and 60.5 metres east to west, and the bank itself is impressively wide, reaching nearly 19.5 metres across in the northern quadrant, where it also stands at its tallest internal height of just over two metres. A possible entrance survives in the western quadrant, where the bank appears to slope down on the south-western side, though the north-western section is obscured by scrub and brambles. A narrow field drain, roughly half a metre wide, cuts through the bank on a north-east to south-west line, possibly following a gap that was already there. Immediately to the east, a second enclosure sits just six metres away, close enough to suggest the two were related in function or period. A bowl-barrow, a small funerary mound of prehistoric type, lies 180 metres to the south-east, and a pond barrow of similar morphology to this enclosure sits some 10 kilometres to the south-west, though that one lacks any defined entrance. The broader cluster of monuments points to a landscape that was used and reused across long stretches of prehistory, even if this particular earthwork's date and purpose remain unresolved.