Enclosure, Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a quiet pasture at Mooresfort in County Tipperary, a square enclosure surrounds a ring-ditch, and neither of them leaves so much as a ripple in the grass.
The whole complex is invisible at ground level, its existence known only because a series of aerial photographs, taken as part of the Bruff 54 survey, caught the crop or soil marks that betray buried features to a camera looking straight down.
The enclosure sits roughly two to three metres east of a ditch barrow, a type of prehistoric burial mound defined by a surrounding ditch rather than an earthen bank. Inside the square enclosure lies a ring-ditch, which is typically the eroded remnant of a circular mound or a deliberately dug ritual boundary, both forms associated with funerary and ceremonial activity in prehistoric Ireland. The pairing of a square enclosure with an internal ring-ditch is an uncommon arrangement, and its proximity to the nearby barrow suggests this small corner of Tipperary was a meaningful place in the landscape long before any written record begins. No excavation appears to have taken place, so the date and precise function of the monument remain open questions.