Enclosure, Carrigeensharragh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Carrigeensharragh, Co. Tipperary

At Carrigeensharragh in County Tipperary, a prehistoric or early medieval enclosure has all but vanished into a reclaimed field above the Moyle river valley.

What remains amounts to roughly nine metres of a slight curving bank in the south-west quadrant, its internal face barely a tenth of a metre above the surrounding ground, its external face rising to less than half a metre. For most visitors, and in most lights, it would register as nothing at all.

The enclosure belongs to a cluster of features that once defined this stretch of ground. A ringfort, the kind of circular earthwork commonly associated with early medieval farmsteads, formerly stood about 300 metres to the west, though it too has been levelled. A graveyard survives some 500 metres to the north-west. The enclosure itself was substantial enough to appear on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, which recorded the southern half of it clearly. By the time the second edition was surveyed in 1906, only a smaller portion of the southern sector was still legible in the landscape. Subsequent agricultural improvement removed the rest, along with the field boundaries to the south and west of the monument. The surviving bank continues northward until it merges with the present field boundary, meaning that the only legible fragment of the structure is now partly disguised as an ordinary hedgerow edge.

The setting retains a quiet logic even if the monument itself does not. The site sits on a break in slope, the ground falling away toward the Moyle river valley below, the kind of position that would have offered both visibility and a degree of natural definition to whoever originally laid out the enclosure. That relationship between the land's shape and the human structures once imposed upon it is now the most tangible thing left to read.

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Pete F
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