Enclosure, Mooresfort, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In a grazed field on a south-east-facing slope at Mooresfort in County Tipperary, there is an enclosure so thoroughly flattened by time and farming that it can barely be read as a structure at all.
What remains is a sub-oval earthwork, roughly 24 metres by 20 metres, defined by the ghost of a bank and a shallow surrounding fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch dug to reinforce the boundary of an enclosure, the excavated material typically thrown inward or outward to form the accompanying bank. Here, the bank survives to an internal height of just 0.2 metres and an external height of a mere 0.05 metres, barely a ripple in the pasture. The fosse is similarly vestigial, around 2.2 metres wide and 0.15 metres deep. This is a site that asks a great deal of its observers.
The enclosure was identified during a field survey carried out by Alison McQueen and Vera Rahilly on 28 November 2008, suggesting it had gone unrecorded before that date despite sitting in ordinary improved farmland. A modern field fence cuts directly across the ESE sector of the monument, running north-north-east to south-south-west and severing the bank. A small fragment of the bank continues on the far side of the fence in the south-west quadrant before tapering away entirely. In the south-east quadrant, a concrete pad has been laid to anchor a livestock trough against the fence line, and the ground on both sides of that fence has been heavily poached by cattle, compounding the damage already done by agricultural improvement over what may have been centuries. The interior of the enclosure slopes gently to the south-east, following the natural fall of the hillside.