Enclosure, Burncourt, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a flat ridge above the marshy ground near Burncourt in County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that can only really be said to exist in a photograph.
No earthwork rises from the scrub, no ditch or bank interrupts the rough vegetation, and a person walking the site today would find nothing obviously out of place. The monument is known almost entirely from a single aerial image taken on 19 July 1970, in which the outline of a roughly circular enclosure appears as a cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in growing crops that betrays buried or disturbed ground beneath, where buried ditches retain moisture differently from the surrounding soil and cause the vegetation above them to respond accordingly.
When the photograph was taken, the field had been reclaimed and its boundaries regularised, the kind of agricultural improvement that was common across Irish lowlands in the mid-twentieth century and that frequently obscured or destroyed older features at ground level even as it, paradoxically, made some of them more legible from the air. The Shanbally river runs approximately thirty metres to the south of the ridge. Since 1970, the reclaimed field has reverted; the imposed boundaries are no longer evident, and rough scrub has come back over the ground. Whatever the enclosure once was, a farmstead boundary, a ringfort of the early medieval period, or something older still, it left no trace visible to anyone standing on the ridge today.