Enclosure, Ballinard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinard, Co. Tipperary

On a slope above the Tipperary countryside at Ballinard, a semi-circular earthwork sits quietly in a grazing field, its outline visible mainly as a series of levelled scarps in the grass.

The monument is not quite complete; modern field boundaries have cut across it to the south-east and south-west, and its interior has long since been absorbed into the surrounding pasture, sloping gently downward to the east in line with the natural fall of the ground. What survives is enough to trace the shape: a broad earthen bank running from north to north-north-east measures roughly 5.3 metres wide and just under a metre in height, while a second, slightly more substantial scarp curves from the east-north-east down toward the south, reaching 6 metres wide and 1.3 metres high. Together they describe an enclosure approximately 35 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west.

The enclosure's relationship with its immediate landscape is worth pausing over. Adjoining it to the south-east is a ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland, typically defined by one or more earthen or stone banks and associated with farming families of that period. The proximity of the two features raises the question of whether they were ever functionally connected, though what that relationship might have been is not recorded. Adding a further puzzle is a shallow linear depression, around 2 metres wide and 18 metres long, that cuts across the northern sector of the enclosure on a roughly east-north-east to west-south-west axis and continues beyond its outer edge, suggesting a feature that either pre-dates or post-dates the enclosure itself. A possible quarry has also been noted on the slope to the east. The site commands broad views to the east and south, which may or may not have mattered to whoever shaped this ground.

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Pete F
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