Enclosure, Ballynaraha, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballynaraha, Co. Tipperary

On the crest of a low ridge in County Tipperary, a raised oval earthwork sits in a cut meadow, hemmed in on one side by the busy Clonmel to Carrick-on-Suir road and bisected internally by a concrete block wall and a post-and-wire fence.

It is, in short, an ancient enclosure that the modern world has been steadily eating into, and what survives tells a slightly melancholy story of incremental loss.

The monument is an oval raised area roughly 36 metres across on its longer axis, defined by a scarp, that is, a steep face of earth and stone marking the outer edge of the bank. A fosse, the defensive ditch that typically runs around the outside of such enclosures, was recorded in the northern quadrant on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps surveyed between 1901 and 1905, but road-widening works removed it entirely. A possible second fosse survives in the eastern quadrant as a wide, shallow depression, around five metres broad and just over a third of a metre deep, which is slight but suggestive. The interior of the enclosure is concave, a characteristic that often points to long settlement or use, and carries a notably lush grass cover. In the north-western quadrant the ground still stands 2.25 metres above the level of the surrounding scarp, giving a real sense of the original form, even as the south-western quadrant has been levelled and truncated by the encroaching road infrastructure. Dumped stone and fill material lies scattered outside the north-western edge, close to the concrete wall, further evidence of the disturbance the site has absorbed over recent decades.

The enclosure sits in a meadow with a five-metre buffer zone maintained around what remains of the monument, and the land falls away to the south-east from the ridge top. The road running past the south-western edge is steep-scarped on both sides following widening works, so the surviving portions of the earthwork are most legible from the northern and eastern sides, where the original ground level and ditch traces are least disturbed.

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Pete F
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