Ring-ditch, Ballynagrana, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Ballynagrana, Co. Tipperary

There is nothing to see at this particular corner of County Tipperary, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.

A field of gently undulating improved pasture near Ballynagrana gives no indication that anything lies beneath it, yet aerial photography has revealed the ghostly outline of a ring-ditch, a roughly circular cropmark roughly six metres in diameter, pressed into the earth and invisible from the ground.

Ring-ditches are the ploughed-out or silted-up remains of circular ditched enclosures, most commonly associated with prehistoric burial monuments such as round barrows. Over millennia, the raised mound at the centre erodes and the surrounding ditch fills, leaving only a difference in soil chemistry that shows up in aerial photographs as a ring of darker or lusher growth in a dry summer. The Ballynagrana example was never recorded on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting it had already lost all surface expression long before systematic mapping began. It came to light only through an aerial photograph, reference OSI 2436/5, which captured the faint circular trace that fieldwork alone would almost certainly have missed. The site does not stand in isolation: at least two other ring-ditches have been identified nearby, and a separate mound survives on the ground roughly sixty metres to the east, hinting that this quiet stretch of Tipperary pasture was once a landscape of some ceremonial or funerary significance.

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Pete F
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