Enclosure, Killeenbutler, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a ridge in the undulating hill country of County Tipperary, a prehistoric enclosure has essentially vanished.
Not dramatically collapsed or buried beneath later construction, but simply levelled, absorbed back into the pasture until nothing at all remains above ground. What makes this particular absence interesting is that someone still knows roughly where it was. The present landowner retains a general sense of the area the monument once occupied, a piece of knowledge that now substitutes for the monument itself.
The enclosure was real enough when the Ordnance Survey mapped it twice. The first edition six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, shows it as a roughly circular earthwork approximately 33 metres north to south and 35 metres east to west, sitting at the edge of a ridge summit and sloping away to the south-east. The second edition, published in 1906, records it again in broadly the same form. On both maps a contour line bisects the feature, confirming its position right on the break of the ridge rather than on flat ground. Enclosures of this type, usually defined by a raised bank and internal ditch, are among the most common monument types in the Irish landscape, associated variously with settlement, ritual, or agricultural use across a broad span of prehistory and the early medieval period. A second levelled enclosure of the same kind was recorded on the opposite ridge to the south-east, close enough that the two would once have been clearly visible to one another across the valley between them. Whether that proximity was coincidental or meaningful is now impossible to say.