Enclosure, Cloghleigh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a south-facing slope in County Tipperary, a rectangular enclosure sits so thoroughly absorbed into the improved pasture around it that its outline can barely be read from ground level.
The visible traces amount to a raised area no more than five centimetres above the surrounding field, with slight rises still perceptible along the eastern and western sides. The southern edge has been levelled entirely, and only the line of a field boundary along the northern side gives the shape any structural legibility at all.
What makes the site quietly interesting is the comparison between what survives on the ground today and what the Ordnance Survey recorded in 1905. The six-inch map from that year shows a considerably larger rectangular enclosure, measuring roughly 30 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, adjoining the same northern field boundary. The present surface traces suggest something closer to 22 metres by 30 metres, which points to a century or more of gradual agricultural levelling that has eaten into the form from the south in particular. Enclosures of this kind, typically defined by an earthen bank or a combination of bank and ditch, were a common feature of the early medieval Irish landscape, used variously for settlement, farming, or as enclosures around ecclesiastical sites. This one sits approximately 110 metres south of a second recorded enclosure, suggesting the two may have had some functional or chronological relationship, though the notes do not elaborate on that connection.