Enclosure, Ballyherberry, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyherberry, Co. Tipperary

Some places survive only on paper.

In a pasture on a south-facing slope in Ballyherberry, County Tipperary, there is nothing left to see of what was once a substantial oval enclosure, its earthworks levelled around 1975 or 1976. The ground gives little away now, though the uneven terrain across the area hints at older disturbances, rock outcroppings and evidence of quarrying that predate any modern interference.

The enclosure appeared on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and again on the revised edition surveyed between 1952 and 1954, measuring roughly 54 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west. A sketch plan and sections drawn in 1954 captured what was still visible at that time: an oval monument with a dished interior, the kind of bowl-like depression that often accumulates within earthwork enclosures, bounded along the south-eastern to south-western arc by a low bank and elsewhere defined by a scarp, a deliberate slope cut or built up to mark the boundary of the interior. Enclosures of this general type are found across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though their functions vary considerably and this one was never excavated. A lime kiln, a small stone structure once used to burn limestone to produce agricultural lime, sits about 100 metres to the north-north-west, its presence a reminder that this landscape was worked steadily across many centuries. By the time Cahill noted the enclosure's destruction in 1982, the monument had already been gone for several years, surviving only in the earlier maps, the 1954 fieldwork, and the subsequent record.

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