Enclosure, Graystown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
What looks at first glance like an ordinary rocky field in County Tipperary turns out, on closer inspection, to be the ghost of a small medieval settlement.
The ground here preserves, just barely, the grass-covered wall-footings of at least four houses, the faint line of a road running north to south, and two large sub-circular enclosures sitting roughly fifteen metres apart. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels this rectangular, rock-outcroped field a "Fair Green", which suggests it once served as a gathering place for livestock trading or local markets, a common feature of rural Irish life in earlier centuries.
The enclosures, each defined by a low, poorly preserved bank of earth and stone, appear to have been settlement plots associated with late medieval rectangular houses that fronted directly onto that central road. The better-documented of the two measures roughly 19.25 metres north to south and 15.9 metres east to west, its bank surviving to an internal height of only 0.4 metres and an external height of about 0.2 metres. A rectangular house sits directly opposite it, and it is possible that the enclosure originally belonged to a second house whose surface remains have entirely vanished. The whole arrangement sits immediately north of a tower house, a fortified residence of the kind that Anglo-Norman and Gaelic lords alike built across Ireland from the fourteenth century onwards, along with an associated bawn, the defensive walled enclosure that typically surrounded such structures. Together, the tower house, the bawn, and this fragmentary streetscape suggest a small but organised late medieval settlement clustered around a place of local commerce.