Enclosure, Clonacody, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a fairway at Slievenamon Golf Club in County Tipperary, a circular enclosure lies largely buried and unannounced, its outline surviving in little more than a ghost.
The site was first identified not by anyone walking the ground but by an aerial photograph taken in the summer of 1996, which revealed a roughly circular cropmark, the kind of subtle discolouration in vegetation that sometimes betrays buried ditches or banks below the surface. Cropmarks like these appear when differential soil moisture causes crops or grass above buried features to grow or stress at a slightly different rate to the surrounding ground, making ancient boundaries briefly legible from the air.
By the time the enclosure had been formally recorded, the field containing it had already been absorbed into the golf course, and earthworks associated with the course construction, artificial mounds and greens, had reworked the landscape around it. What survives above ground is a very low, broad, curving bank along what appears to be the eastern half of the original circuit, with a diameter of around thirty metres measured north to south. The western half has been entirely lost at ground level, and the interior of the enclosure slopes down towards the west, falling in the direction of a nearby river gully. Enclosures of this general type are common across Ireland and could date from anywhere between the Bronze Age and the early medieval period, often serving as farmsteads, small ringforts, or ceremonial spaces, though without excavation it is impossible to say more about this particular example.
For anyone playing the course, the faint curving bank is easy to miss, blending into the sculpted contours of the fairway margins. It is one of those places where the past and the present have been folded together without much ceremony, the low earthwork sitting quietly among bunkers and tee boxes, its original purpose long since overtaken by a very different kind of organised ground use.