Ring-ditch, Lisduff, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Lisduff, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a level pasture field in Lisduff, County Tipperary, lies a monument that exists, as far as anyone standing in that field is concerned, nowhere at all.

There is no mound, no earthwork, no marker of any kind. The site reveals itself only in aerial photographs, where the crop or soil above it betrays a circular anomaly invisible to anyone walking the ground.

A ring-ditch is typically the buried remnant of a circular ditch, often the last surviving trace of a prehistoric funerary or ritual monument, sometimes a ploughed-out barrow whose earthen mound has long since been levelled by centuries of cultivation. This particular example was identified from an aerial photograph taken on monochrome film, a method that was for decades one of the primary tools archaeologists used to locate sites that had been absorbed entirely into the agricultural landscape. What is quietly striking about the Lisduff site is that it does not stand alone. A second ring-ditch lies roughly 100 metres to the east-northeast, and an enclosure of some kind sits about 105 metres to the south-southeast, suggesting this corner of Tipperary was, at some point in the remote past, a place of some significance, even if the land has since been given over entirely to grass and plough.

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