Enclosure, Strike, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
One of the more telling signs that a landscape feature was once considered significant is when the boundaries drawn around it refuse to ignore it.
In the townland of Strike, County Tipperary, a largely levelled earthwork enclosure sits on the southern end of a north-south ridge, and the townland boundary along its southern sector quietly kinks outward to go around it, as though whoever drew the line centuries ago thought it worth preserving on paper, even after the monument itself had been reduced almost to nothing.
What survives today is a circular raised area roughly 23.6 metres north to south and 21.6 metres east to west, its edge defined by a very gradual scarp less than a metre high. A possible fosse, the term for a defensive or boundary ditch dug around an enclosure, runs around it some four metres wide, and traces of a flattened outer bank still show in the south-east sector. Cahill, writing in 1982, recorded that the enclosure had originally consisted of two banks with corresponding fosses, suggesting a more substantial double-ringed earthwork, with a possible entrance in the south-east quadrant. The ground falls away to the east and west of the ridge, meaning the site would have occupied a naturally prominent position, modest by the standards of a hillfort but clearly deliberate. Without excavation it is difficult to date such enclosures precisely, but comparable earthworks across Tipperary range from the prehistoric to the early medieval period, when enclosed settlements were a common form of land organisation and defence.