Enclosure, Solloghodbeg, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Solloghodbeg, Co. Tipperary

In the low-lying boggy ground of Solloghodbeg, a subtly raised oval platform sits in rough pasture, almost entirely obscured by rushes.

What makes it easy to miss is precisely what once defined it: the earthwork enclosure here is so gently expressed in the landscape that only its outline, measuring roughly 33 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, hints at something deliberate underfoot. This is the kind of monument that rewards patience and a good pair of wellies rather than any dramatic first impression.

The structure consists of a raised oval area ringed by a broad, flat bank and an accompanying fosse, which is the term for a ditch dug to reinforce an earthen boundary, with the excavated material typically thrown inward to heighten the bank. Here, the bank reaches about 1.8 metres at its crest and extends to a base width of over five metres, though it survives most clearly in the north-western quadrant, elsewhere having been worn down to little more than a scarp. The fosse, around five metres wide and only a quarter of a metre deep in places, is best preserved on the southern side, where the ground rises slightly to the south and south-west, lending the ditch a more pronounced appearance than its modest depth might otherwise suggest. A shorter stretch of fosse is also traceable in the north-east. An entrance five metres wide opens in the north-north-west. Later agricultural activity has cut across the monument entirely: a field bank bisects it east to west, and a second runs north to south along the eastern edge, both of them overlying the earlier form and complicating any reading of the original plan. The rush growth, particularly heavy on the northern half, is itself a marker of how persistently wet this ground remains, the same marshy conditions that may have shaped where and how the enclosure was originally sited.

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