Enclosure, Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Near Mooresfort in County Tipperary, there is a monument that cannot be seen.
No earthwork rises from the grass, no hollow interrupts the ground, no scatter of stone marks the spot. What is known about this place exists only as a shadow caught by a camera from the air, an incomplete oval outline pressed into the improved pasture above the flood plain of an old river course.
The enclosure was identified through aerial photograph survey, a technique that routinely reveals what centuries of farming and drainage have erased at ground level. Soil and crop marks, invisible to anyone walking a field, can appear with clarity from altitude, particularly when differential moisture or growth betrays a buried feature beneath. In this case, the survey of the Bruff area recorded an incomplete oval form on the western side of the old river's flood plain. Oval and circular enclosures of this kind are associated across Ireland with settlement and activity spanning prehistory through the early medieval period, though without excavation or further evidence it is impossible to say more about what this particular feature represents or when it was made. The incompleteness of the outline may reflect partial survival, or simply the limits of what the photograph could capture.