Enclosure, Derryluskan, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Derryluskan, Co. Tipperary

A faint oval depression in a field in County Tipperary is almost all that survives of what was once a clearly defined circular enclosure, and it takes a practised eye, or knowledge of what to look for, to read the landscape at all.

The site measures roughly 24 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west, with the most legible remnant being a slight trace of a levelled bank along the northern arc. The grass, the slope, the ordinary business of pasture: none of it announces that anything is there.

The enclosure was first formally identified not by excavation or fieldwork but from the air. An aerial photograph taken on 10 July 1969, catalogued as CUCAP AYO 67, showed a circular anomaly in the field, the kind of cropmark or soilmark that cameras at altitude can detect long after ground-level evidence has faded. The 1st edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map had already recorded it as a roughly circular enclosure with a diameter of approximately 30 metres, which suggests it was more visible in the nineteenth century than it is today. Local information confirms what the reduced dimensions now imply: the monument was levelled in recent decades, its bank deliberately reduced to something close to nothing. About 170 metres to the south stands a church, and the proximity of the two features is the kind of pattern that recurs across the Irish countryside, where early enclosures, often the remains of ringforts or ecclesiastical boundaries, frequently cluster near places of worship.

Visitors to the area would need to know exactly where to stand and what they are looking at to make anything of the site today. The northern arc of the former bank offers the best, if still subtle, reading of the original form.

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Pete F
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