Enclosure, Tullohea, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Tullohea, Co. Tipperary

On the 1904 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a neat sub-circular shape is marked in the fields of Tullohea, in County Tipperary.

Visit the same ground today and that shape is only half there. A field boundary cuts straight through what was once a roughly circular enclosure, around thirty metres across, and everything to the north of that wall has been absorbed into the surrounding pasture, leaving no trace on the surface. The southern half survives, but barely; a curving earthen bank runs from east-southeast around to west-northwest, now so overgrown with vegetation as to be effectively impassable.

Enclosures of this kind are among the most common, and most ambiguous, monuments in the Irish landscape. They may be the remains of a ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead used predominantly between the early medieval period and the Viking Age, or they could reflect an earlier or later use of the land altogether. At Tullohea, the enclosure sits near the foot of a south-facing slope, a position that would have offered shelter and reasonable drainage. The straight northern edge of what remains is formed not by any original feature but by a later stone field wall, about 1.2 metres wide, which has effectively replaced or obscured whatever boundary once ran there. Whether the field system grew up around the monument, recognising and incorporating it, or whether it cut across the bank and consumed part of it, is genuinely unclear. The relationship between the western field boundary and the surviving bank raises the same question: the wall may be respecting the older structure, or the bank itself may have been pressed into service as a convenient boundary.

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Pete F
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