Enclosure, Commaun Beg, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Commaun Beg, Co. Tipperary

In the wet, rushy ground of a Tipperary valley, a pair of standing stones occupies the top of a low natural hillock, ringed by the remnants of a circular enclosure that most visitors to the area will never see, partly because a coniferous plantation has grown up around and over it.

The monument sits in a hollow of the landscape, enclosed by higher ground on all sides except to the south, giving it a quality of deliberate concealment, though whether that was ever the intention is something prehistory does not easily answer.

The two stones are composed of shaly limestone and are set on a northeast-southwest alignment, with the larger stone placed to the southwest and its smaller companion standing roughly 0.7 metres to the northeast. They sit near the centre of a kerbed enclosure, a roughly circular arrangement in which a low earthen bank is held in place by stone revetment on both its inner and outer faces; the enclosure measures about 10.7 metres across its east-west diameter. A kerbed enclosure of this type uses facing stones as structural edging to retain the bank material, a technique common in prehistoric ceremonial and funerary monuments across Ireland. The bank itself is modest, rising only about 0.4 metres on its exterior face, and only the southeastern and southwestern portions now survive. The pairing of standing stones within an enclosed setting suggests a ceremonial purpose, though the specific tradition and period remain difficult to pin down without excavation.

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Pete F
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