Enclosure, Ballinglanna, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballinglanna, Co. Tipperary

On a south-facing pasture slope in County Tipperary, the ground holds the faint outline of an enclosure that most people walking past would take for nothing more than a slight unevenness in the field.

What survives is a sub-oval area, roughly twenty metres across its longer axis, defined by a low scarp and a shallow fosse, the term for a ditch or trench that typically formed part of a boundary or defensive perimeter around an enclosed space. Neither feature is dramatic; the scarp rises to only about twenty centimetres at its most pronounced, and the fosse is shallow throughout, its basal width under a metre. The south-eastern to north-western arc retains the clearest definition, while the northern and eastern sides have been worn to something barely perceptible, a gradient so gradual it registers more as a texture than a boundary.

The enclosure was identified during field survey by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly in February 2009, one of those quiet moments of recognition that fieldwork occasionally produces, when a pattern in pasture resolves itself into something purposeful. Complicating the picture is a linear drainage channel, running roughly north to south for fifteen metres, that cuts straight across the eastern sector of the monument, making it harder to read the original form clearly. A further layer of interest lies about twenty-five metres to the north-east, where a conjoined ditch barrow and ring-barrow sit in close proximity to the enclosure. Barrows are burial mounds, and ring-barrows in particular consist of a central mound or flat area enclosed by a circular ditch, often dating to the Bronze Age or early Iron Age. Whether the enclosure and the barrows are contemporary or simply neighbours across centuries is not something the visible evidence alone can settle.

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Pete F
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