Enclosure, Ballyrichard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyrichard, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a working tillage field in Ballyrichard, County Tipperary, lies the ghost of an enclosure that has effectively vanished from the surface of the earth.

It cannot be seen at ground level. No earthwork, no raised rim, no depression betrays it to a visitor walking the field. Its existence is known almost entirely because a cartographer recorded it on the 1906 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and that paper record has outlasted whatever physical form the monument once took.

What the map shows is a penannular enclosure, meaning a roughly circular or oval enclosure that is not fully closed, open at one side rather than forming a complete ring. This one, measuring approximately 35 metres on its longer west-southwest to east-northeast axis and about 30 metres across the shorter dimension, was open to the east. A possible fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch, ran around the northwestern to northeastern arc. Even by 1906, a field boundary already bisected the monument from roughly west to east, and a grove of trees sat to the north of that boundary line. A farm trackway ran immediately to the east-southeast. The enclosure was, in other words, already being parcelled up and worked around rather than preserved, and whatever earthwork survived into the early twentieth century has since levelled out entirely under cultivation.

Enclosures of this type are scattered across the Irish midlands and south, and their origins vary considerably, from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric boundaries, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say which this one might have been. What makes this particular example quietly striking is less any surviving feature than the fact of its disappearance. It persists only as a shape on an old map, a set of dimensions, and a note that it is no longer there to be found.

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Pete F
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