Enclosure, Ballingarrane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
At Ballingarrane in County Tipperary, a circular enclosure exists primarily as a photograph.
No bank, no ditch, no upstanding stonework marks the spot on the ground; what survives instead is a cropmark, a ghostly ring roughly thirty metres across that became visible from the air in July 1970, when differential crop growth betrayed the buried outline of something that had long since ceased to be legible at ground level. Cropmarks form when buried features, such as the filled-in ditches of an ancient enclosure, retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil, causing the vegetation above them to grow at a slightly different rate and colour, a pattern invisible to anyone standing in the field but readable from altitude.
The site sits on the summit of a flat-topped ridge in otherwise rolling terrain, a position consistent with the kind of commanding, easily defensible or ceremonially prominent locations favoured for enclosed settlements and ritual sites across prehistoric and early medieval Ireland. The aerial photograph that identified it was taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, referenced as CUCAP July 1970 BDR 69. When the site was subsequently visited on the ground, only slight undulations in the field surface were noted, and no definable enclosure could be traced. The field had recently been cut for silage, which would have further reduced whatever faint topographical hints remained. The monument, in practical terms, is the photograph.