Enclosure, Glennaskagh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A modern field boundary cuts straight through the middle of this ancient enclosure in Glennaskagh, County Tipperary, quietly erasing part of what it crosses.
The line drawn on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a circular earthwork roughly 45 metres across, but on the ground today only a fragment survives, the rest lost to generations of agricultural use.
What remains is a semi-circular trace on the northern and eastern arc, where a bank, originally raised to enclose the interior, has been worn down to a low scarp, roughly eight metres wide and less than a metre high. Enclosures of this type are a common feature of the Irish landscape, typically associated with early medieval settlement, where a ringfort, known in Irish as a ráth when constructed from earth and bank, would have enclosed a farmstead or family compound. Here, the interior slopes sharply to the south-east, following the natural fall of the hillside, and has long since been absorbed into the surrounding pasture. The site sits on a steep south-east-facing slope, and whatever stood within it once commanded a wide outlook across the landscape to the east-north-east and south-west.