Enclosure, Ballyvaughan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On the flat summit at the eastern end of a ridge in County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that has been almost entirely erased from the landscape.
Ploughing has levelled what was once a circular earthwork, and an electricity pylon now stands roughly thirty metres to its north-east, an unremarkable presence beside what remains of a much older structure. To the casual eye, walking the field today would reveal very little.
What survives does so quietly. The enclosure, approximately thirty metres across from east to west, still registers as a slight circular rise in the ground, the kind of subtle undulation that most walkers would dismiss as natural variation in the terrain. On the eastern side, traces of a shallow fosse remain, a fosse being simply a ditch dug around an enclosure as part of its boundary or defence. A high field bank sits immediately to the west, and to the north, a field boundary that once existed has been removed entirely, surviving now only as a cropmark, a ghostly outline visible in aerial photography when growing crops reveal buried features beneath the soil by ripening at slightly different rates. It was a July 1970 aerial photograph, taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, that first captured the enclosure's circular form clearly, before subsequent agricultural work further reduced what little remained above ground.