Enclosure, Poulacapple, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Poulacapple, Co. Tipperary

A small country road cuts straight through the south-eastern edge of this ancient enclosure near Poulacapple in County Tipperary, neatly bisecting something that was already old beyond memory when the road was laid.

That kind of casual truncation is, in its own way, a form of documentation: it tells you the monument had lost its social meaning long before anyone thought to protect it.

What survives sits on a north-west-facing slope in improved pasture, a roughly circular area measuring approximately 22 metres across. It is defined by a scarp, which is essentially a cut or step in the ground, and a fosse, a ditch dug around the perimeter. Enclosures of this type are common across Ireland and are generally associated with early medieval settlement, most likely the enclosed farmsteads known as raths or ringforts, though without excavation the date and function of any individual example remain uncertain. At Poulacapple, the fosse runs from the south-west around to the north-east and has had a complicated afterlife: part of it was re-cut and repurposed as a land drain at some point, and a section to the north-east was backfilled, creating what now reads as a modern causeway crossing the ditch. The material dug out of the fosse in the south-west sector was not removed but left alongside the scarp, giving that portion the appearance of a low bank, with an external height of around 1.4 metres. There are also two gaps, one in the scarp at the west-north-west and one in the outer edge of the fosse slightly south of that, which may represent an original entrance passage into the enclosure. The interior surface, despite a covering of long grass, shows signs of unevenness consistent with some degree of ground disturbance beneath.

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