Enclosure, Glenbane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Some archaeological sites announce themselves with towers or carved stone; others have been quietly erased from the landscape entirely, surviving only as faint signatures in the soil.
On a stretch of flat pasture in Glenbane, County Tipperary, with open views in every direction and the River Suir not far to the north-west, a roughly circular enclosure of around 44 metres in diameter is now all but invisible at ground level. What was once an upstanding earthwork can only really be detected as a cropmark, the kind of ghostly outline that appears in aerial photographs when crops or grasses grow unevenly over buried features below.
The monument had a documented life above ground for at least a few decades. Office of Public Works files from the 1950s included a sketch plan and section depicting a roughly oval shape defined by a scarp, a low earthen slope or bank marking the enclosure boundary. By April 1974, an aerial photograph showed a D-shaped form still clearly upstanding. Sometime in the 1980s, however, the landowner levelled it, and by the time a photograph was taken in July 1989 it had already retreated into the earth, legible only from the air. A second enclosure of the same general type lies roughly 200 metres to the south-west, suggesting this part of Tipperary was once a more structured and inhabited landscape than the open pasture now implies. Enclosures of this kind are a common monument type across Ireland, often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is difficult to say more about what this particular site was or when it was in use.

