Enclosure, Figlash, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Figlash, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a grazed field on the edge of a ridge in Figlash, a circular enclosure roughly thirty metres across sits entirely out of sight.

No earthwork breaks the surface, no bank or ditch catches the eye. The only evidence that anything lies here at all is a single aerial photograph taken in 1973, in which the outline of the enclosure shows up as a cropmark or soil discolouration, the kind of trace that only becomes legible when viewed from altitude and at the right season.

Aerial photography has long been one of archaeology's more quietly revelatory tools in Ireland, capable of exposing features that centuries of ploughing, grazing, and settlement have effectively erased at ground level. The Figlash enclosure, recorded from a 1973 Geological Survey of Ireland flight, appears roughly circular in plan, with a field boundary running roughly east to west along its northern edge. Circular enclosures of this type are common across the Irish landscape and are generally associated with early medieval settlement, the enclosed farmsteads known as raths or ringforts, though without excavation the date and function of this particular example cannot be confirmed. What makes it notable is precisely its absence: the ridge-edge location above ground falling south-west towards the Glen River, the undulating pasture, the utter invisibility from the surface.

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Pete F
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