Enclosure, Ballydavid, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
At Ballydavid in County Tipperary, a small stream bisects what was once a roughly circular enclosure, cutting through the site as if indifferent to whatever purpose the earthwork once served.
The enclosure, measuring approximately 50 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west, is the kind of feature that rewards patience and a good eye. Its defining bank has been so thoroughly reduced that only fragments of it remain legible in the landscape, and a plantation of young ash saplings now rings the perimeter, following the line of the old earthwork at a slight remove.
Enclosures of this type are among the most common monuments in the Irish countryside, often associated with early medieval settlement, farming, or ritual use, though their individual histories are rarely easy to pin down. What makes the Ballydavid example particularly striking is how it came to be so diminished. According to Office of Public Works files, the monument appears to have been levelled during Land Project Works in the late 1950s, a state-sponsored programme of agricultural improvement that reshaped considerable stretches of the Irish countryside in that period. The bank, which would once have defined the enclosure clearly, now survives only as a slight surface trace along its north-eastern to south-eastern arc, with the south-western section reduced to interior and exterior heights of 0.7 metres and 0.35 metres respectively, and a width of around 12 metres. The interior on both sides of the stream slopes gently down toward the water, which itself runs roughly along the long axis of the site.
The enclosure sits between forestry to the west and rough pasture to the east, a quietly marginal position that perhaps explains both its survival and its neglect. The ash saplings planted around it are a more recent presence, but they trace the old boundary closely enough to give a visitor some sense of the enclosure's original scale, even where the earthwork beneath has largely been erased.