Enclosure, Glenbane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Glenbane, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a ploughed field in Glenbane, County Tipperary, sits an enclosure that has not been visible to the naked eye for decades.

It survives now only in older maps and photographs, a circular earthwork that once rose above the surface of a low glacial hillock on a north-facing slope, with open views spreading out in every direction.

The enclosure was recorded on the second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1953 to 1954, where it appeared as a raised earthwork measuring roughly 32 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west. Field workers who visited the site in the 1950s produced a sketch plan and profile that refined those dimensions slightly, describing an oval area, approximately 26 metres by 18 metres, enclosed by a low bank. An aerial photograph taken by the Geological Survey of Ireland in April 1974 confirmed what the maps had already suggested: the form of the enclosure was still legible from the air, even as agricultural activity was steadily erasing it at ground level. Enclosures of this type, broadly circular or oval earthworks defined by a bank and sometimes a ditch, are found across Ireland and are often associated with early medieval settlement, though without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a precise date or function to any individual example. Today, no trace remains above ground.

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