Enclosure, Ballynagleragh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynagleragh, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a field of improved pasture in Ballynagleragh, County Tipperary, lies a monument that has been entirely erased from the visible landscape.

No earthwork, no ridge, no shadow in the grass betrays it. The only evidence that it ever existed comes from a single aerial photograph taken in May 1977, in which the outline of a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 90 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and around 42 metres across, emerges faintly from the cropmarks below.

What makes this particularly curious is that the enclosure never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard record of Irish field monuments for over a century. It sat, unrecorded in cartographic form, within a field that also contains a moated site, a type of medieval enclosed homestead typically surrounded by a water-filled ditch, located in the north-west corner of the larger monument. The two features together suggest a landscape with some depth of occupation or use, though the enclosure itself resists easy interpretation. By the time aerial survey caught it in 1977, levelling of the ground had already reduced it to nothing detectable at surface level, and today there is no physical trace whatsoever remaining.

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