Enclosure, Lawlesstown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a gently sloping, south-facing field in Lawlesstown, County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that exists only on paper.
Walk the ground today and you will find nothing: no earthwork, no ditch, no raised lip of soil to suggest that anything ever stood here. The field is under tillage, the terrain quietly undulating, and the monument has effectively ceased to exist at ground level.
What makes the site legible at all is a single cartographic moment. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, records a sub-square enclosure on this slope, measuring roughly 26.5 metres north to south and 29.5 metres east to west. By the time the second edition was produced in 1904, it had vanished from the map entirely, suggesting the feature was already degraded or obscured by agricultural activity within those six decades. Enclosures of this general type are common across the Irish landscape and typically served as enclosed farmsteads or settlement areas in the early medieval period, defined by an earthen bank and outer ditch. Here, whatever defined the boundary has been ploughed away. The field boundaries to the west and south have also been removed, erasing the secondary landscape framework that once surrounded it.