Town defences, Bohercrow, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Town Defenses

Town defences, Bohercrow, Co. Tipperary

The medieval defences of Bohercrow in County Tipperary exist today almost entirely as an absence.

No wall survives, no earthen bank, no fosse (the defensive ditch that would typically have accompanied a medieval town circuit) is visible at ground level. What remains is something more ghostly: the shape of the town itself, whose street pattern and boundaries are thought to preserve the outline of a settlement that was formally enclosed, or at least intended to be, some seven centuries ago.

The evidence for those defences comes from two murage grants, a type of royal licence that authorised a town to collect tolls on goods passing through in order to fund the construction or maintenance of its walls. The first was issued in 1300 for a period of ten years, and a further grant followed in 1310 for three years more. Whether the money raised ever produced a substantial stone circuit is unclear, but the grants themselves indicate that Bohercrow was, at the turn of the fourteenth century, a place of sufficient economic and administrative standing to warrant such attention. Scholars have suggested that the medieval town covered roughly fifteen hectares in a rectangular plan, with the church and graveyard positioned at its north-western angle and the castle anchoring the south-eastern corner. The River Ara, running along the southern edge, would have served as a natural boundary in place of constructed defences on that side.

For anyone walking the modern town, the satisfaction lies in reading the present through the past. The broad alignment of streets, the placement of church and castle at opposing corners, the river at the margin, these are not coincidences but survivals, the faint geometry of a planned medieval settlement legible in a landscape that has quietly retained its shape even as every physical trace of its walls has vanished.

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