Enclosure, Outeragh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A flattened rise in a Tipperary pasture does not announce itself as anything remarkable.
Yet this low-lying corner of Outeragh holds the ghost of an early enclosure, levelled to the point where only a slight swelling in the ground, roughly 48 metres across its north-east to south-west axis, betrays that something deliberate once stood here. What gives the site its quiet interest is not the enclosure alone but the company it keeps: a ringfort lies approximately 120 metres to the west, and a ringwork, a type of earthwork enclosure associated with medieval occupation and sometimes with Anglo-Norman settlement, sits around 60 metres to the south-west. The enclosure immediately to the south may once have been physically joined to this one.
An aerial photograph taken on 13 July 1966 as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography captured what ground-level inspection obscures: the enclosure reads from the air as a roughly triangular shape, with one side formed by a modern field boundary running north-east to south-west along its southern edge. The original structure appears to have been defined by a bank and an external fosse, that is, a ditch dug on the outside of the bank to amplify its defensive or boundary effect. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 offers another layer of evidence, suggesting that this enclosure and the one immediately to its south were still legible as a conjoined feature at that date, before agricultural activity broke their relationship and reduced both to hints in the soil.