Enclosure, Brenormore, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Brenormore, Co. Tipperary

In the flat pasture of Brenormore, a ghost of an ancient boundary sits almost flush with the ground, so thoroughly absorbed into the working farmland around it that only careful measurement distinguishes it from the field itself.

What survives is the worn outline of a sub-circular enclosure, roughly 22 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, its defining bank reduced to barely half a metre in height. Around part of its arc there are traces of a fosse, the shallow ditch that would once have accompanied such a bank, here surviving to a depth of only 0.15 metres. The interior is level and has long since been folded into the surrounding pasture.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape, typically associated with early medieval settlement, and often interpreted as the remains of a ringfort, a defended farmstead of the kind that was in widespread use from roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries. This particular example has been additionally eroded by a road that cuts across its northern arc, severing what was once a more complete circuit. The 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the enclosure sitting directly adjacent to a second enclosure to its north, the two presumably part of the same complex or landscape. By the time the 1904 edition was produced, a road running east to west had been laid between them, physically separating what had once been neighbouring features. That road truncation, combined with the gradual levelling of the bank over generations of agricultural use, accounts for the fragmentary state of what remains today.

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Pete F
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