Enclosure, Graniera, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On the south-eastern slope of a flat-topped hill in Graniera, County Tipperary, there is a circular enclosure that nobody on the ground has ever seen.
The landowner has no recollection of anything unusual in the field, and the site is not visible at ground level. It exists, as far as anyone can tell, only from the air.
The enclosure was identified from a single aerial photograph taken in 1974. From altitude, the roughly circular outline became legible against the hillside, which drops steeply from its flat summit down to a valley below. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and typically indicate the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used from the early medieval period onwards, or occasionally something older. The earthwork, if it ever rose above the surface in any meaningful way, has long since been reduced to little more than a crop mark or soil discolouration, the kind of trace that only reveals itself under particular conditions of light, drought, or angle of view. What the photograph captured may be all that remains of a settlement that was already centuries old when it finally disappeared into the hillside.