Ring-ditch, Tulla, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Ring-ditch, Tulla, Co. Tipperary

A field in Tulla, County Tipperary contains a prehistoric monument that you could walk across without ever knowing it was there.

No earthwork rises above the soil, no stones break the surface, and the improved pasture rolls away on all sides without offering the slightest hint of anything buried beneath. The site only reveals itself from the air, showing up in an aerial photograph as a circular cropmark roughly eight metres in diameter, the ghost of a ring-ditch pressed invisibly into the ground.

A ring-ditch is typically the remnant of a circular burial monument, the filled-in trench that once defined the perimeter of a Bronze Age mound or barrow. Over millennia, the raised mound above may erode and disappear entirely, leaving only the ditch beneath, detectable now mainly through the way soil conditions affect crop growth above it. At Tulla, this particular ring-ditch never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the standard cartographic record that has documented Irish topography since the nineteenth century. Its existence was established solely through aerial photography, specifically Ordnance Survey photograph 2351/0. What makes the location stranger still is its company: two further ring-ditches lie close by, one roughly twenty metres to the south and another roughly twenty metres to the northwest, suggesting this quiet patch of Tipperary farmland was once a place of deliberate, repeated, and probably ritual significance.

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Pete F
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