Enclosure, Lisheendarby, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Lisheendarby, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a working milking parlour in Lisheendarby, County Tipperary, lies the ghost of an enclosure that has not been visible at ground level for well over a century.

It survives only in cartographic memory, its shape shifting quietly between two editions of the Ordnance Survey maps as the landscape around it changed.

The first edition OS six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, recorded a roughly D-shaped enclosure measuring approximately 39 metres east-northeast to west-southwest and 26 metres north-northeast to south-southwest, sitting to the south of a field boundary that ran west-northwest to east-southeast. By the time the 1904 edition was produced, that field boundary had been removed, and the enclosure appeared reduced to a semi-circular form of around 30 metres in diameter, its western edge seemingly cut away by a trackway running roughly north to south. Such enclosures, broadly speaking, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish landscape; many are the remains of ringforts, the circular or roughly circular enclosed farmsteads that were the dominant settlement form in early medieval Ireland. Whether that is the case here is not confirmed, but the form is consistent with the type. What the maps together suggest is a feature that was already losing its definition to agricultural reorganisation before the twentieth century had even begun, and that has since disappeared entirely beneath the yard and buildings of a working farm.

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