Settlement cluster, Crampscastle, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Settlement Sites

Settlement cluster, Crampscastle, Co. Tipperary

A mound of earth and stone sitting in a Tipperary pasture is often all that remains when a settlement gets erased, and at Crampscastle that is more or less what happened.

Sometime during the 1970s, land consolidation works levelled what had been a cluster of small houses along with the enclosure that surrounded them. The settlement sat on a low rise in undulating farmland, to the west of a castle, and by the time the machinery had finished, the rubble-built houses and the earthworks around them were gone. What remains is a large mound measuring roughly 40 metres north to south, 13 metres east to west, and standing about 2.5 metres high, abutting a scarp at its south-eastern edge. The prevailing local view is that this mound is the clearance material itself, the collapsed walls and accumulated debris of Crampstown simply pushed into a heap rather than carted away.

The settlement was known locally as Crampstown, a name that links it to the nearby castle from which the townland takes its identity. Before the 1970s clearance, the houses were described as small structures of random rubble stonework, meaning walls built from uncut or roughly cut stones laid without formal coursing, the most common building technique in rural Ireland for centuries. By the time anyone thought to record what had been there, the buildings had already collapsed and become overgrown with briars. The enclosure, a defined boundary feature that would once have delineated the settlement's extent, was levelled at the same time. Land consolidation schemes of that era, which reorganised field systems to improve agricultural efficiency, were responsible for the disappearance of a considerable number of such sites across Ireland, often before any formal survey had taken place.

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