Enclosure, Ballyslatteen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyslatteen, Co. Tipperary

A field boundary in County Tipperary takes an unexplained kink, and a farm roadway cuts straight through what was once, in all likelihood, a deliberately enclosed space.

The oval enclosure at Ballyslatteen measures roughly 40 metres north to south and 47 metres east to west, and it survives not as an upstanding monument but as a ghost in the landscape, readable only through careful attention to the ground and, more recently, through satellite imagery. The southern arc of the enclosure is preserved as a fosse, a cut ditch, visible as a cropmark, a variation in plant growth above buried features that reveals itself from altitude. The northern arc, meanwhile, has been absorbed into a field boundary, its curve betrayed only by a deliberate irregularity in what would otherwise be a straight east-west line.

The site was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, and the 1840 first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map offers a small but telling detail: a limekiln marked in the north-western angle of the enclosure. A limekiln, typically a stone-built structure used to burn limestone and produce quicklime for mortar, fertiliser, or whitewash, implies that material was being quarried from that corner of the site, which may account for some of the damage to the northern portion. The farm roadway that now runs east to west through the centre of the enclosure completes a picture of incremental, practical erasure, each generation making use of the land without necessarily knowing, or needing to know, what lay beneath their feet. Cropmarks to the north and north-west suggest a possible field system in the vicinity, though whether that system and the enclosure belong to the same period of activity remains an open question.

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