Enclosure, Ballysimon, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A townland boundary cuts clean through the middle of this small enclosure in County Tipperary, a bureaucratic line drawn across something considerably older.
The boundary does not follow the logic of the monument; it simply bisects it, running east to west, as if the enclosure had already been forgotten by the time anybody thought to divide the land.
The enclosure itself is nearly circular, roughly 20 metres north to south and 19 metres east to west, sitting in a level stretch of improved pasture where drained stream beds and drainage channels are still visible in the ground. What defines it is a combination of a scarp, a step-like drop in the earth, and an outer fosse, which is the term for a rock-cut or earthen ditch typically used to reinforce a boundary or barrier. The fosse is most pronounced on the north-western to north-eastern arc, where it reaches nearly a metre in depth and almost nine metres wide, but it shallows and narrows considerably around the south-eastern quadrant. Where the field boundary crosses the monument to the east and west, the fosse has been backfilled, effectively erased at the points where later land management needed to move through. There are also traces of a possible outer bank surviving in the north-western quadrant, low on the exterior but somewhat more defined on the interior face. A large natural hollow lies roughly seven metres to the south-south-east, close enough to have influenced the original choice of location, or simply to complicate the reading of the earthworks for anyone examining the site today.