Enclosure, Rathkenny, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
In a field of improved pasture on a south-east-facing slope in County Tipperary, there is an ancient enclosure that no longer exists in any form a person walking past could detect.
It is not ruined, not overgrown, not reduced to a faint earthwork. It is simply gone from the surface of the ground, leaving no visible trace whatsoever, absorbed completely into the agricultural landscape around it.
The enclosure was still legible in 1840, when the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as a roughly circular feature approximately 35 metres in diameter. Even then, the process of erasure was already under way. A field boundary ran through the monument on a north-west to south-east line, passing just east of its centre, and a second boundary cut across the northern quadrant from east to west, effectively claiming that portion of the enclosure as part of a small field. Enclosures of this kind, broad circular earthworks, were used throughout early medieval Ireland for a variety of purposes including settlement, agriculture, and the enclosure of livestock, sometimes associated with nearby ringforts. Two such ringforts do survive in the vicinity, one roughly 220 metres to the south-east and another enclosure about 270 metres to the north-east, suggesting this was once a more densely occupied landscape than it appears today. By the time the second edition Ordnance Survey maps were produced between 1903 and 1904, the circular enclosure had disappeared from the cartographic record entirely. The two field boundaries that had bisected it had merged into a single line, the small northern field was gone, and the monument itself had been smoothed away by decades of agricultural improvement.
There is nothing to see at ground level now, and the site sits within ordinary working pasture. Its interest lies precisely in that invisibility, in the gap between what the 1840 map recorded and what the land shows today, a quiet illustration of how quickly an ancient feature can be unmade.