Enclosure, Ardmayle, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On an east-facing slope near Ardmayle in County Tipperary, a faint swelling in the grass is almost all that remains of what was once a substantial enclosure.
To the untrained eye it reads as nothing more than uneven ground, but the outline it traces is that of a roughly circular earthwork, measuring approximately 42 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, with a companion enclosure sitting about 30 metres to its south.
What makes this particular site quietly puzzling is the question of its original shape. When the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in the nineteenth century, the enclosure was recorded not as a circle but as a D-shape, its flat edge running along an east-west axis at the northern side. That straight edge corresponds to a field boundary, which appears to have cut across the monument at some point, erasing or obscuring whatever arc once closed it to the north. Over time, agricultural levelling has done further work, reducing the whole structure to that barely perceptible rise of ground. Enclosures of this general type, often associated with early medieval settlement or territorial marking in the Irish landscape, would once have been defined by an earthen bank and internal ditch, enclosing a domestic or ceremonial space within. The site sits on rising ground with wide views in all directions, a position that, whatever the enclosure's original purpose, would have made it conspicuous and well-placed in the local landscape.