Enclosure, Killaidamee, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In a field in County Tipperary, an ancient enclosure survives almost entirely out of sight.
Measuring roughly 29 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, it sits on a low east-west ridge on a north-facing slope in valley-floor terrain, and from ground level there is simply nothing obvious to see. No bank rises from the grass, no clear earthwork catches the eye. The only hint that something once stood here is a slight dip in the northwest quadrant, which may be the ghost of a fosse, the defensive ditch that would have ringed a structure of this kind, and a curving field boundary that follows the arc of the monument's southwest quadrant as though the land itself still remembers the shape.
Both editions of the Ordnance Survey map the site as an enclosure, and the more detailed 25-inch edition records something more elaborate: an outer bank running from the northwest to the northeast, separated from the inner structure by an intervening fosse, with a gap in the north-northeast. That gap may have been an entrance. Field boundaries to the east and south have truncated whatever earthworks remained, and the boundary to the west has been removed entirely, leaving the monument without even that partial outline on one side. Lady's Abbey, a medieval ecclesiastical ruin, is visible to the northwest, a reminder that this stretch of Tipperary was once a well-populated and religiously significant landscape. The relationship between the two sites, if any existed, is not recorded, but their proximity is quietly suggestive.
Because the enclosure is invisible at ground level, the experience of visiting is an unusual one. What draws attention is not what you can see but what the cartographic record insists is there, legible on old maps but dissolved, for practical purposes, into ordinary farmland.
