Enclosure, Corbally, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Corbally, Co. Tipperary

At the edge of a precipice in Corbally, overlooking a river valley to the west, there is an ancient enclosure that is, by most accounts, almost impossible to see.

Writing in 1982, a researcher named Cahill described it as "just barely visible at ground level", and little appears to have changed since. What survives is less a monument than the memory of one, pressed almost flat into improved pasture on land that falls away sharply to the north.

The most legible trace remaining is a section of fosse in the northwest quadrant. A fosse is a defensive or boundary ditch, typically dug around an enclosure to define and protect its perimeter, and this one has been backfilled over time until it is nearly flush with the surrounding ground. Its overall width measured around 5.45 metres, its basal width just under two metres, and its surviving depth a mere ten centimetres across a surviving length of sixteen metres. The 1905 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map offers a clearer picture of what once existed: the enclosure was then defined by a scarp running from the southeast around to the north, with the fosse visible in the northwest, a field boundary incorporated into its southern edge, a small pond just inside that boundary, and a stream running north to south along the enclosure's western edge. That field boundary has since been removed, and the pond is no longer recorded, leaving the landscape stripped of the details that once made the site legible.

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Pete F
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