Enclosure, Barrettstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Barrettstown, Co. Tipperary

At Barrettstown in County Tipperary, a rectangular earthwork sits quietly in scrubby woodland, its edges gnawed away by quarrying and its interior thickened with undergrowth.

What survives is enough to suggest the original scale of the thing, but only just; the site has been so heavily worked over that reading it as a coherent structure requires some patience and a willingness to piece together fragments.

The enclosure measures roughly 31 metres northeast to southwest and 42 metres northwest to southeast, making it a substantial feature for the area. It is defined by a bank, around 3.7 metres wide and still standing to just over a metre in external height in places, along with a fosse, the term for the accompanying ditch, running along the northeastern and southeastern sectors. This fosse is about 2.6 metres wide and 0.7 metres deep where it survives. Along other stretches, the enclosure is marked only by a low scarp rather than a full bank-and-ditch arrangement, and both the northwestern and southeastern sides have been quarried into, removing not only the edges but much of the interior ground as well. A stream runs along the western and southwestern sides of the enclosure and has been canalised at some point into a deep, cut channel, meaning even the natural boundary of the site has been altered from whatever its original form might have been. The result is a place that carries the outline of past significance while wearing the marks of centuries of practical, unsentimental use by people who needed stone or drainage more than they needed an intact earthwork.

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Pete F
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