Enclosure, Rathclarish, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathclarish, Co. Tipperary

On a steep north-east-facing slope in the Tipperary hills, a flat ledge holds the ghost of an enclosure that has effectively vanished from the land.

Roughly 35 to 40 metres across and sub-rectangular in shape, it was still visible enough to be mapped in the second edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch series in 1906, but it has since been levelled by tillage and can no longer be made out at ground level. Only one remnant survives with any confidence: a low earth and stone bank running north-west to south-east, about 1.7 metres wide and just under a metre high, now buried under a tangle of brambles and fern.

What lends the site its peculiar interest is a reference buried in the Fogarty Manuscript, a folklore document dating to 1851 and held in the National Folklore Collection. The manuscript contains an illustration of a decorated boulder, a piece of rock art, which was reportedly dug out of what the writer described as a "motte or forth" on the north-west side of the pass of Rathclarish, approximately 180 metres from a nearby rath. A ringfort, sometimes called a rath or forth, was a common form of enclosed settlement in early medieval Ireland, typically defined by a circular earthen bank and ditch. A motte was a quite different structure, a raised earthen mound associated with Norman fortification, and the loose use of both terms in the manuscript reflects the casual interchangeability common in nineteenth-century folklore writing. Whether the "motte or forth" in question refers to the Rathclarish ringfort recorded elsewhere in the townland, or to this enclosure sitting in the north-west portion of the same ground, remains uncertain. The decorated boulder itself has its own separate record, and the connection between it and this particular earthwork is suggestive rather than proven.

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