Enclosure, Lisheen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisheen, Co. Tipperary

At Lisheen in County Tipperary, there is an ancient enclosure that no longer announces itself to anyone walking the ground.

Whatever boundary once defined it, whether earthen bank, ditch, or wall, has been worn so thoroughly flat by time and agriculture that visitors standing directly on top of it would have no way of knowing it was there.

What makes the site particularly curious is its shape. When the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were produced in the nineteenth century, surveyors recorded it as hexagonal, which is an unusual form for an enclosure in the Irish archaeological record. Most early enclosures, from the ringforts of the early medieval period to later farmstead boundaries, tend toward circular or oval plans. A hexagonal outline suggests something either deliberately geometric or heavily modified by later activity, though the notes offer no firm answer on that point. The enclosure sits on a low hillock amid undulating countryside, the kind of gentle, unremarkable rise that would once have offered a modest but useful vantage over surrounding land.

Because nothing survives above ground, the site exists today almost entirely as a cartographic fact, a shape recorded by nineteenth-century surveyors that has since dissolved back into the landscape.

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