Enclosure, Ballyveelish, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyveelish, Co. Tipperary

A circular earthwork roughly twenty-six metres across sits on a gently sloping, north-east-facing hillside in County Tipperary, its low bank so disproportionately wide relative to the space it encloses that archaeologists are not entirely sure what it is.

The bank, measuring nearly twelve metres at its base but only about a third of a metre above the interior ground level, raises a quiet question: is this the degraded remnant of what was once a more substantial enclosure, or was it always built this way, making it not a domestic or agricultural structure at all, but an embanked barrow, a form of burial monument where the raised ring itself is the defining feature rather than a central mound?

The site was never captured on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which means it slipped past the standard cartographic record entirely. It came to light through excavation work carried out in 1981 and 1982 along the Cork-Dublin gas pipeline corridor, a project that cut through a remarkably dense cluster of monuments in this part of Tipperary. That excavation, published by Doody in 1987, revealed several other features in the immediate vicinity: a moated site a short distance to the south, a Bronze Age enclosure roughly 110 metres to the south-west, and, about 200 metres further in the same direction, a Bronze Age ditch barrow accompanied by a cist, a stone-lined burial box of the kind associated with individual interments from the second millennium BC. The enclosure sits among all of this without quite belonging to any single period or category, its southern bank barely visible, its function still an open question.

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