Enclosure, Graystown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Graystown, Co. Tipperary

A field in County Tipperary that the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels a "Fair Green" turns out to conceal something considerably older and more complex than a market ground.

Beneath the grass of this rocky outcrop, the low footings of at least four possible houses survive, along with the trace of a central road and two large sub-circular enclosures that may once have defined individual settlement plots. The whole ensemble sits immediately north of a tower house, a fortified residence of the kind built by Anglo-Norman and Gaelic Irish lords throughout the medieval period, together with its associated bawn, the walled enclosure that typically surrounded such a structure for the protection of livestock and inhabitants.

The picture that emerges is of a small settled community gathered around a fortified centre. The enclosures to the east of the former road are substantial: one measures roughly 39 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west internally, defined by an earth and stone bank whose base is around 2.4 metres wide, though the bank itself now stands only about 0.65 metres high on its interior face. A possible rectangular house foundation sits within its southern quadrant. Fifteen metres to the north lies a second enclosure of comparable form. Whether this represents a planned medieval settlement, an earlier arrangement of farmsteads, or something that evolved gradually around the tower house complex is not fully resolved, but the convergence of house footings, road, and enclosures in a single field suggests a place where people once organised their lives with some deliberateness. The Fair Green label on the nineteenth-century map hints at a later, more public use of the same space, layering another chapter over what was already a well-used piece of ground.

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Pete F
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