Enclosure, Lisnamuck, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On a north-facing slope just below the crest of a ridge in County Tipperary, there may or may not be an ancient enclosure.
That uncertainty is not a failure of record-keeping so much as a genuine historical puzzle, one that turns on the difference between a monument and a quarry, and on whether a nineteenth-century cartographer got things right or quietly wrong.
The 1840 first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows what appears to be a roughly oval enclosure at Lisnamuck, measuring approximately 31 metres northeast to southwest and 25 metres northwest to southeast, tapering towards the southwest. Enclosures of this kind, typically circular or oval earthworks that once defined a farmstead or settlement, are among the most common archaeological monuments in Ireland, though many have been lost to agriculture and development over the centuries. By the time the revised OS map was produced in 1904 to 1905, the enclosure had vanished from the record entirely. What exists on the ground today is a small disused quarry, overgrown with brambles and whitethorn. The cartographic evidence points towards the monument having been levelled between those two survey dates, but there is an alternative reading: that the 1840 cartographer made an error, and that the quarry was always there, misidentified or misdrawn as an enclosure. No excavation or detailed field investigation appears to have resolved the question either way.
The site sits in rolling Tipperary terrain, and the quarry that now occupies the area is largely reclaimed by scrub vegetation. What remains is less a monument than an absence where a monument might once have been, or perhaps never was.