Enclosure, Springmount, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Springmount, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a Tipperary field, a circular enclosure lies completely out of sight, leaving no ridge, no hollow, no stony outline to betray its presence at ground level.

The only evidence that anything is there at all comes from the air, where the soil and crops above it behave slightly differently from everything around them.

The site at Springmount was identified through aerial photography as a circular cropmark, the kind of faint ghost that appears when buried features, ditches, walls, or banks alter how moisture moves through the earth above them. Crops growing over a filled-in ditch, for instance, tend to grow taller and greener in dry conditions, while those above a buried wall may thin and yellow. Seen from above at the right moment in summer, these differences resolve into shapes: circles, rectangles, the outlines of things long since levelled. The enclosure sits on a gentle south-facing slope, currently under tillage, which is precisely the kind of setting where such marks tend to show clearly. Circular enclosures of this type in Ireland are often associated with early medieval settlement, the ringfort being the most familiar example, though without excavation it is impossible to say what period or purpose this particular feature belongs to.

There is nothing to see from the ground. The field looks like a field.

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Pete F
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