Field system, Clasheleesha, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
At ground level, this site in Clasheleesha offers almost nothing to the eye.
The pasture is improved and largely level, a wet, rushy patch persists in the north-west corner, and the banks that once defined the enclosure have been reduced to the faintest of ridges. Yet from the air, the outlines of something deliberate and quite old resolve themselves into a trapezoidal enclosure, its geometry interrupted by four later field boundaries that converge precisely where the archaeology is most eroded.
The enclosure was identified from aerial photographs, and what survives on the ground is fragmentary. The south-west corner is the most legible section, where a levelled bank roughly 5.7 metres wide retains an interior and exterior height of only 0.07 metres on either side, flanked by the shallow remains of a fosse, a ditch cut to define and defend a boundary, running between 2.0 and 2.9 metres wide and surviving to a depth of just over a metre in places. The eastern half of the southern side and a return along the east side extend for some 20 metres, with the bank there slightly more pronounced at 0.15 metres in height. Complicating the picture further is a circular area approximately 12 metres north to south and 15 metres east to west, visible on the aerial photograph cutting into the northern half of the east side. The north bank is largely levelled, the north-west corner has left no surface trace at all, and the fosse in the northern section is waterlogged. Immediately to the north sits a separate circular enclosure, suggesting this corner of County Tipperary held a concentration of activity whose full extent the landscape has largely swallowed.