Enclosure, Milltown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath the improved pasture of Milltown in County Tipperary, something circular is hiding.
A roughly twenty-metre-wide ring, almost certainly the remnant of an early enclosure, shows up clearly on aerial photography but leaves no trace whatsoever at ground level. Walk across the field and you would have no reason to pause. The grass is even, the land gently rolling, the soil long since smoothed by drainage and tillage. The feature exists, in any practical sense, only from the air.
The enclosure appears on a GSI aerial photograph, catalogued as R.439/8, as a distinct circular crop or soil mark. It was never recorded on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced across multiple revisions from the mid-nineteenth century onward, meaning it either escaped the surveyors' notice entirely or had already been so thoroughly absorbed into the agricultural landscape that nothing remained to sketch. A second enclosure sits roughly thirty metres to the north-west, suggesting this part of Milltown once held more structured activity than the present pasture implies. Enclosures of this kind are typically early medieval in date, the buried footprint of a ringfort, a class of monument once numbering in the tens of thousands across Ireland and used as enclosed farmsteads by families of some local standing. Most that survive above ground do so as earthen banks; those that do not survive, like this one, tend to make themselves known only when dry summers stress the vegetation unevenly over buried ditches or banks, producing the faint circular shadows that aerial survey is designed to catch.