Enclosure, Higginstown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A faint curving depression in a Tipperary pasture field is all that physically survives of what was once called Bally-na-scullog, an ancient enclosure that sat at the crossing point of two early road routes.
Most of it has been levelled, and a modern road and what appears to have been a barn have since been built directly over the north-eastern sector. The south-east to south-west quadrant, though, still registers as a slight hollow in the ground, roughly three and a half metres wide, the last trace of a boundary that once formed a roughly circular ring about twenty-seven metres in diameter.
The name and something of the character of the place were recorded by John O'Donovan in the Ordnance Survey Namebooks of 1840, where he noted it as "the site of ancient fences forming an enclosure called Bally-na-scullog." O'Donovan also observed the traces of two ancient roads meeting here, one running through the western side of the townland and the other heading north-east through its centre. The enclosure sits on a gentle north-facing slope in undulating terrain, lying just to the south-east of a small turlough, which is a seasonally flooding lake characteristic of limestone country, where water rises and drains back through the bedrock depending on the time of year. Old field boundaries in the area have since been cleared away and replaced, which has erased much of the surrounding landscape context. An aerial photograph taken in 1974 still showed the enclosure clearly enough to confirm its roughly circular outline on the ground, though the levelling that removed most of it must have occurred sometime after O'Donovan's visit and before that survey flight.