Enclosure, Moanmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath the wet pasture of Moanmore in County Tipperary, a circular feature roughly ten metres across sits quietly undetected, absent from every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps and entirely invisible to anyone standing in the field above it.
It exists, as far as current knowledge goes, only as a shadow caught in a single aerial photograph.
The feature came to light through aerial photograph Bruff 5/2093, which revealed a circular cropmark or soilmark in the low-lying, gently undulating grassland. Cropmarks of this kind typically appear when buried archaeological features, such as the filled-in ditches of old enclosures, cause subtle differences in how vegetation grows or dries out above them, differences invisible at ground level but legible from the air. The circular form, about ten metres in diameter, is consistent with a small enclosure, a category of monument found widely across Ireland and associated with a broad range of periods and functions, from early medieval farmsteads to prehistoric ritual sites. A second enclosure lies approximately sixty metres to the south-south-east, suggesting the two features may share some relationship, though what that relationship might be remains unknown. The site was never mapped by the Ordnance Survey, which means it left no trace in the historical cartographic record and was likely unrecognised as anything other than ordinary farmland until the aerial evidence was examined.