Enclosure, Ballyglass, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some archaeological sites announce themselves with standing stones or crumbling walls.
This one in Ballyglass, County Tipperary, cannot even be seen from the ground. What may be an ancient enclosure, a roughly circular or oval boundary feature of the kind commonly associated with early medieval settlement or farming activity in Ireland, exists here only as a shadow, a faint trace readable solely from the air.
The site was identified from a single aerial photograph taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland on 16 April 1974. That image, catalogued as R. 506/7, captured something in the landscape that ground conditions simply do not reveal. By the time the site was formally recorded, the area had become overgrown with vegetation, obscuring whatever surface evidence might once have been detectable. The word "possible" in the classification is doing real work here; without excavation or further survey, the feature remains tentative, a candidate rather than a confirmed monument. What is clear is that the site does not stand alone in this part of Tipperary. Two other enclosures sit within a few hundred metres, one approximately 350 metres to the west-southwest, another around 250 metres to the southeast, suggesting this corner of the townland may once have supported a cluster of activity, though the nature and date of that activity remain unresolved.