Enclosure, Moanmore, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Moanmore, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a field of improved pasture in Moanmore, Co. Tipperary, lies an enclosure that no nineteenth-century cartographer ever recorded and that leaves no mark on the ground today.

It exists, as far as current knowledge goes, only in a single aerial photograph, which reveals the faint cropmark outline of a roughly rectangular enclosure measuring approximately 20 metres northeast to southwest and 22 metres northwest to southeast. Cropmarks appear when buried features, ditches or walls beneath the soil, affect how grass or crops grow above them, creating subtle variations in colour and height that become legible only from the air.

What makes the site stranger still is its company. Three ring-ditches cluster around it, the circular buried remains of what were likely prehistoric funerary or ceremonial monuments. One sits on the southeast side of the enclosure's interior, another lies roughly 40 metres to the east, and a third approximately 30 metres to the south-southwest. The enclosure itself never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard baseline record for Irish archaeological sites, which means it either escaped notice during the original surveys or had already vanished below the plough line by the time those maps were made. Its relationship to the surrounding ring-ditches is unclear, and without excavation it is impossible to say whether the enclosure and its neighbours belong to the same period or represent entirely separate episodes of human activity on this low, gently rolling ground.

There is nothing to see at ground level now. The field has been improved pasture for long enough that whatever earthworks once defined this place have been entirely absorbed into the landscape.

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Pete F
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