Enclosure, Kilmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
There is a circular enclosure at Kilmore in County Tipperary that nobody can see.
It sits just below the crest of a ridge on a north-east facing slope, overlooking a flat valley, and the grass grows over it entirely undisturbed. No earthwork breaks the surface, no shadow falls differently at dusk, no slight depression gives the game away. The only reason we know it exists at all is that a surveyor recorded it more than two centuries ago and then the land simply moved on without it.
The enclosure appears on an estate map drawn in 1815 by John Longfield, who was commissioned to survey the holdings of one John Bagwell in the old baronies of Iffa and Offa, in south Tipperary. Longfield's map, now held in the National Library of Ireland, shows a circular feature at this location with enough clarity to have it recognised as a monument. Circular enclosures of this kind are common across Ireland and can date from the prehistoric period through to the early medieval, sometimes serving as ringforts, the enclosed farmsteads that were the basic unit of rural settlement for centuries. Whether this one was a ringfort, an earlier ceremonial enclosure, or something else entirely, the map alone cannot say. What it can say is that the feature was legible on the landscape in 1815, which means it had survived long enough to be worth a cartographer's ink, and has since been reduced, by cultivation or by time, to nothing visible at ground level.