Enclosure, Strike, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
Beneath a domestic yard in Strike, County Tipperary, a small piece of the prehistoric landscape has been quietly erased.
Where a driveway, lawn, and house yard now sit, there was once an enclosure, the kind of roughly circular earthwork defined by a single bank that recurs across the Irish countryside, sometimes associated with settlement, sometimes with ceremony, and often impossible to date precisely without excavation. Today, not a blade of grass rises differently here. There is nothing to see.
What is known comes from a 1982 survey by Cahill, which recorded the monument as already levelled at that point. The site occupies a gentle east-facing slope just off a north-south ridge, a position that would have offered both drainage and a degree of natural prominence to whoever built it. Single-banked enclosures of this type were constructed across many centuries in Ireland, and without visible remains or excavated finds, the original purpose of this particular example remains unresolved. The land has long since been absorbed into the working fabric of a private property.