Lisnaboola, Reddanswalk, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

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Lisnaboola, Reddanswalk, Co. Tipperary

An aerial photograph taken on 13 July 1966 shows something that ground-level farming has since done its best to erase: a clearly defined bank encircling a sub-oval enclosure on a south-east-facing slope in County Tipperary.

That bank is now largely gone, reduced over decades of agricultural improvement to a low scarp on the north-east to south-east arc and the eroded remnants of a fosse, the defensive or boundary ditch that typically ran alongside such earthworks, on the south-east to west-north-west. The enclosure itself measures roughly 38 metres north to south and 56 metres east to west, a footprint that would have made it a moderately substantial ringfort, the kind of enclosed farmstead that served as the basic unit of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland.

The name Lisnaboola preserves the memory of what once stood here more faithfully than the landscape does. "Lios" in Irish refers precisely to this type of enclosure, an earthen ringfort, and the name appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, meaning it was already being used to identify the spot when those surveys were carried out in the nineteenth century. By then the monument was almost certainly already degraded, its bank reduced by generations of ploughing and land clearance. What the 1966 aerial photograph captured was a site still legible from above even when it had become difficult to read at ground level, a common experience with earthworks that survive as cropmarks or soil variations long after their physical fabric has been compromised. Today, a farm trackway running east to west cuts through the fosse on the north side, and farm buildings in the north-north-east have truncated the enclosure's edge further still, leaving only fragments of the original circuit visible as shallow surface features in improved pasture.

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