Enclosure, Tullohea, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullohea, Co. Tipperary

On a north-west-facing slope in Tullohea, County Tipperary, a circular enclosure once occupied the land.

It no longer does. There is nothing to see, no earthwork, no ring of stones, no depression in the grass, just pasture rolling across the spot where a structure significant enough to be carefully mapped twice has since been completely levelled.

The enclosure appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 and again on the revised edition produced between 1901 and 1905, marked in both cases as a circular feature. Circular enclosures of this kind, sometimes the remains of Early Medieval ringforts used as defended farmsteads, were once extremely common across the Irish countryside, but agricultural improvement has erased enormous numbers of them over the past two centuries. At Tullohea, the process is complete. The field boundary that once ran to the north of the enclosure has also been taken away. What survives is a single detail that most walkers would pass without noticing: a field bank to the east, still standing, with a slight kink in its line. That deflection is not a surveying error or a lazy piece of fencing. It is the ghost of the enclosure itself, the bank having been built, or maintained, in a way that curved around the monument that once stood beside it.

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Pete F
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