Enclosure, Ballymalone More, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some places earn their place in an archaeological record not because of what survives, but because of what no longer does.
At Ballymalone More in County Tipperary, there was once an enclosure sitting on a south-west-facing slope of rising upland ground, with a stream running nearby to the west. An enclosure of this kind would typically have been a roughly circular or oval earthwork, defined by banks and ditches, used in early medieval Ireland for a farmstead, a religious site, or sometimes a more ceremonial purpose. Whatever its original function, the site is now gone, bulldozed at some point before the early 2000s, and today nothing is visible at ground level.
The loss was recorded by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien in their 2002 Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, where the destruction was noted on the basis of local information. The inventory was the result of systematic fieldwork across North Tipperary, cataloguing monuments that ranged from fully intact to entirely obliterated. Ballymalone More fell into the latter category. The landscape itself, upland and sloped with that small watercourse to the west, is exactly the kind of setting that early Irish enclosures frequently occupy, where decent drainage, elevated visibility, and a reliable water source all converge. That combination of features likely drew people to this spot in the first place, centuries before the bulldozer arrived.