Enclosure, Ardmayle, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ardmayle, Co. Tipperary

On a east-facing slope outside Ardmayle in County Tipperary, a subtle swell in the grass is all that remains of what were once two ancient enclosures sitting barely thirty metres apart.

The larger of the southern examples measures roughly 44 metres north to south and 40 metres east to west, its outline now traceable only as a low rise of ground, a gentle circular thickening in a landscape that otherwise gives little away. A companion enclosure to the north lies in a similar condition, levelled to the point where both sites register more as a feeling underfoot than a structure visible to the eye.

What makes the site quietly interesting is the documentary trail left by the Ordnance Survey mapping process. On the first edition OS six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, the southern enclosure does not appear as a marked antiquity at all. Instead it shows up as a semi-circular kink in a north-to-south field boundary, the kind of anomaly a cartographer might record without necessarily understanding its origin. Immediately to the east of that kink, the same map shows a large circular enclosure that has since been entirely levelled and is now barely perceptible at ground level. By the time the current OS six-inch map was produced, the picture had shifted again: the southern area is depicted as a small enclosure with a larger one joined to its west. The gradual disappearance of these features across successive surveys is, in its own way, a compressed history of how agricultural land use slowly absorbs and erases earlier patterns of settlement and enclosure. The site sits on rising ground with open views in all directions, the kind of position that would have made practical sense to whoever originally defined these boundaries, for reasons that can no longer be confidently recovered.

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Pete F
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