Enclosure, Toberadora, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Toberadora, Co. Tipperary

At roughly 85 metres across, the enclosure at Toberadora is considerably larger than the ringforts that dot the surrounding Tipperary countryside, and its position makes clear that size alone was not the point.

The earthwork sits on the edge of a natural cliff above the Toberadora stream, using the steep drop to the water as a ready-made defensive wall on its southern side. That combination of scale and cliff-edge placement is what sets it apart from the ordinary ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead found across early medieval Ireland, and suggests this may once have served a rather different purpose.

The enclosure is defined by a bank of earth and stone, with an outer fosse, a defensive ditch, running around much of its perimeter. On the southern river-facing side the fosse has been filled in, leaving a flat berm-like ledge between the bank and the cliff edge. A possible entrance gap of about four metres survives at the west-south-west. Inside, in the southern quadrant, traces of a semi-circular stone feature may represent the remains of a substantial circular structure, though it is too worn to say more with confidence. A lime kiln, the kind of small stone furnace once used to burn limestone into agricultural lime, has been built into the external face of the bank at the south, and a farmhouse and old farm buildings occupy the bank at the south-south-east. By 1975, when a survey recorded the site (Cahill 1975), internal divisions were still visible as low banks in the north-west and south-west quadrants. Those features have since been erased by agricultural activity, a process confirmed by aerial photographs taken in April 1974, which still showed the enclosure more intact.

Today the monument sits in working farmland, and modern agricultural sheds and a silage pit have been inserted into the north-east quadrant, cutting into the bank and edging slightly into the interior. The enclosing bank is further interrupted on the west and north-west by later field boundaries. What remains is still legible in the landscape, a broad grassy circle on a gentle rise, with good views in every direction and the stream running below the cliff to the south, but it requires some patience to read the archaeology through the accumulated alterations of the past two centuries.

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