Mound, Springmount, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Sitting in a working tillage field near Springmount in County Tipperary, a small oval mound rises just enough above the surrounding ground to catch the eye of anyone who knows what to look for.
It is flat-topped, measuring roughly four and a half metres across its longer axis and three metres across the shorter, and its edges are defined by a pronounced scarp, the term for an artificial slope or cut face, that reaches nearly three metres in height on its north-west to north-east side. That combination of a levelled summit and deliberate scarping is a tell-tale sign that this is no natural feature, but something shaped by human hands at some point in the past.
The mound's southern and south-westerly sides present a slightly different profile. There the scarp is lower and narrower, gradually levelling off to a shallow rise of only about twenty centimetres, before meeting a steep counterscarp, the outer face of an earthwork bank or ditch edge, less than a metre wide but over a metre tall. This asymmetry suggests a structure that was carefully engineered rather than simply piled up, though the full extent of its shape is now partly obscured by overgrowth along its north-east and west-south-west sides. Mounds of this general type in Ireland range from prehistoric burial monuments to early medieval inauguration sites or ringfort remnants, and without excavation it is difficult to say with certainty which category this one belongs to. What can be said is that someone, at some point, went to considerable effort to build and define it.