Enclosure, Brittas, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A low earthwork on a north-west-facing slope in County Tipperary has been quietly absorbed into the working landscape around it, its outer bank doubled up as a field boundary so completely that the two are now almost inseparable.
The enclosure sits in gently undulating grassland, and its roughly circular shape, measuring approximately 34.7 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, is defined by a gently sloping scarp, a fosse (a defensive ditch), and that ambiguous outer bank. Whether the bank was always part of the original monument and later pressed into service as a field division, or whether a later boundary was simply built to follow the curve already there, is not entirely clear. Either way, the result is an ancient form preserved not through any deliberate conservation effort but through the ordinary pragmatism of farmers who found it useful.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1840 to 1841, already shows the outer bank functioning as a field boundary, with the north-east section continuing northward to meet two other boundaries. By that point the monument had presumably been part of the agricultural pattern for generations. A farm road running immediately to the west of a north-south field boundary cuts through the western quadrant of the enclosure, and the western edge has been lost entirely at ground level. What survives on the surviving arc is readable enough: the inner scarp still rises around half a metre, and the outer bank reaches just over a metre in internal height. About 300 metres upslope to the south-east, a possible ringfort occupies the same broad landscape, suggesting this corner of Tipperary was once considerably more structured and inhabited than its present quietness implies.
The interior of the enclosure is level and has been planted with a mixed stand of coniferous and deciduous trees, fenced off with a wooden fence strung with electric wire. The planting obscures whatever surface detail might otherwise survive inside, and the fence keeps casual visitors at a distance. The most legible portions of the monument are the surviving bank and fosse on the north-east to south-west arc, where the earthworks are clearest and the relationship between the ancient enclosure and the later field system can be read in the same glance.