Enclosure, Ballynahow, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A low, barely-there ring in a Tipperary pasture is easy to dismiss as a trick of the light or a quirk of the plough, yet the enclosure at Ballynahow preserves something genuinely odd: a circular earthwork so worn down by centuries of agricultural improvement that its interior has been stripped of soil altogether, leaving the roots of several trees planted inside it exposed at the surface.
The bank that defines the circle, running from south-west to east-south-east, rises only about twenty centimetres on the interior face and a little under half a metre on the outside, which gives some sense of how thoroughly the land around it has been reworked over time.
The monument is roughly ten metres across at its widest, a modest diameter that places it among the smaller class of enclosed sites found throughout Ireland. An enclosure of this type would originally have consisted of a raised bank and an accompanying fosse, the term for the external ditch from which the bank material was quarried. Here the fosse survives in fragmentary form, best preserved along the western and northern arc, though it is shallow and partly silted. The bank itself has been breached at four points, at the south-west, west-north-west, east-north-east, and east, suggesting either deliberate gaps made for access at different periods or the cumulative effect of stock movement over a long span of time. The monument has been further compromised by a field boundary cutting across it on an east-north-east to west-south-west axis, and by a deep land drain, roughly one and a half metres deep, driven through the south-south-east sector. Evidence of older water channels from earlier drainage episodes is also visible in the ground. Just two metres to the west sits a ditch barrow, a type of funerary monument defined by a surrounding ditch rather than a raised mound, which raises the possibility that the two features are related, though the connection remains unresolved.