Enclosure, Kilballyherberry, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Kilballyherberry, Co. Tipperary

In a field of improved pasture at Kilballyherberry, sloping gently down toward the base of Kill Hill, lies an enclosure that has effectively vanished.

There is no visible surface trace remaining, nothing to catch the eye or interrupt the grass, yet the site has a documented presence going back to the earliest systematic mapping of the Irish countryside.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840 recorded something here, though cartographers at the time rendered it as a triangular area with sides of roughly twenty metres, which is an unusual shape for an ancient enclosure and may reflect either the surveyor's interpretation or the condition of the feature at that moment. By the time the second edition of the six-inch map was produced in the early 1950s, the record had shifted considerably: the same location was now shown as a circular enclosure measuring approximately forty-one metres north to south and forty-two metres east to west, more than double the earlier dimensions. In 1954, Ordnance Survey fieldworkers produced a sketch plan and cross-sectional drawings depicting a slightly oval monument enclosed by a bank, the kind of earthwork that in an Irish context typically denotes a ringfort or related enclosure, a farmstead type that was widespread across the country from the early medieval period onward. Whether the discrepancy between the 1840 triangle and the 1950s oval reflects genuine change on the ground, differences in surveying method, or simply the difficulties of recording a feature that was already fading is impossible to say now. What is clear is that by the time anyone thought to document it in detail, the enclosure was already losing its argument with the surrounding farmland.

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