Enclosure, Monksgrange, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
There is nothing to see at Monksgrange, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.
On a gently rising slope in County Tipperary, a D-shaped enclosure roughly 32 metres by 39 metres has left no mark whatsoever on the surface of the ground. The field has been ploughed, the earthworks are gone, and the place announces itself to the casual eye as ordinary farmland. Only from the air does something reveal itself: a cropmark, the faint differential in how crops grow over buried soil disturbance, tracing the outline of what was once a substantial enclosure surrounded by a fosse, a defensive ditch cut into the earth.
The site has been known about, in one form or another, since the mid-nineteenth century. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in 1840, recorded it as an irregular, roughly D-shaped enclosure. By the time the second edition was surveyed in 1904 to 1905, it was described as a D-shaped platform with its surrounding fosse still legible. That progression, from upstanding earthwork to barely-there platform to invisible cropmark, tells a quiet story about what agricultural intensification does to ancient sites over the course of a century or so. Aerial photography has also hinted at a possible internal feature within the enclosure, though what that feature might be remains unconfirmed. D-shaped enclosures of this kind are generally associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often serving as enclosed farmsteads or ringfort variants, though the specific date and function of this one has not been established from the available record. It has, despite its invisibility, been protected under a preservation order since 1957.