Enclosure, Poulaculleare, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In the townland of Poulaculleare in County Tipperary, a gentle south-east-facing slope holds a peculiarity that is more absence than presence.
What was once recorded as a rectangular wooded enclosure has been cleared and reclaimed as pastureland, leaving only undulations in the field that refuse to resolve into any recognisable shape. It is, in a quiet way, a place defined by what surveyors could not quite confirm and what time has since removed.
The enclosure first appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, marked as a rectangular wooded area sitting in gently undulating terrain. By the second edition of 1906, only a small portion was still being outlined, and even that has since gone. What kept it on the archaeological record at all was a single, suggestive detail: a deliberate kink in the townland boundary, the kind of angular deviation that often signals a much older feature being respected and worked around by later administrative lines. Townland boundaries in Ireland frequently preserve the memory of earthworks, enclosures, or other features long after the physical remains have vanished, because those boundaries were drawn to accommodate something that was already there. In this case, however, the kink is the only real evidence that anything of antiquity ever existed at this spot. No definable rectangular form survives in the field, and the consensus is that the site cannot now be confirmed as a genuine archaeological monument.
