Enclosure, Lowesgreen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a quietly unremarkable patch of Tipperary pasture, invisible to anyone walking across it, lies the ghostly outline of a substantial prehistoric or early historic enclosure.
There is no earthwork, no ring of stones, no dip in the ground to suggest anything is there. The site exists, for all practical purposes, only in a single aerial photograph taken on 16 April 1974.
That photograph, catalogued as GSI S.657/6, revealed what is known as a cropmark, a phenomenon in which buried archaeological features affect the growth of grass or crops above them, producing subtle variations in colour or height that become legible from the air even when the ground itself shows nothing. The enclosure at Lowesgreen is large by any measure, roughly 59 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, forming a shape described as sub-circular. It does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1840, nor on later editions, which suggests it had already lost all surface expression long before systematic mapping began. A field boundary running east to west along its northern edge may have cut across and partly destroyed the original circuit. The site is not isolated in the landscape: another enclosure lies immediately to the east, a second sits around 120 metres to the north-north-west, and the remains of a mill stand roughly 150 metres to the south-east, hinting at a cluster of activity in this corner of the Tipperary lowlands over a long stretch of time.