Enclosure, Rathkennan, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Rathkennan, Co. Tipperary

On a hilltop in the rolling countryside around Rathkennan in County Tipperary, there is an enclosure that you cannot actually see.

It exists, as far as anyone can tell, only from the air, revealed by the faint geometry of a cropmark pressed into a field under tillage, roughly thirty metres across and nearly circular in outline. Cropmarks form when buried features, walls, ditches, or banks alter the way soil retains moisture, causing the crops above them to grow at slightly different rates and colours, differences that become legible only when viewed from altitude under the right light and at the right time of year.

The site came to attention on an aerial photograph taken in July 2005, during a survey flight over this part of Tipperary. The photograph revealed not one but two possible enclosures on the same hillside, the second sitting roughly sixty metres upslope to the north-east. Enclosures of this kind, roughly circular and of modest diameter, are a familiar feature of the Irish archaeological landscape, associated variously with early medieval settlement, stock management, or ritual use, though without excavation it is impossible to say what purpose this particular example served or how old it is. The two sites appearing together on the same slope raises the possibility that whatever activity once took place here was more substantial than a single structure would suggest.

At ground level, none of this is visible. The field shows nothing to the casual eye, and the enclosure remains entirely a feature of the photographic record rather than the physical landscape.

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Pete F
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