Enclosure, Knockballynoe, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
At Knockballynoe in County Tipperary, there is an ancient enclosure that most walkers would pass without a second glance, and with good reason: there is almost nothing left to see.
The only hint that something once stood here is a slight downslope on the eastern side of an otherwise level pasture field. Everything else has been absorbed back into the land.
What survives in the cartographic record tells a more structured story. An Ordnance Survey six-inch map depicts a semi-circular form roughly thirty metres across on its north-south axis, its shape defined by three distinct elements: an inner scarp, an intervening fosse (a ditch, typically dug to reinforce a boundary or defensive line), and an outer bank curving from the south-east around through south and west to north. This kind of enclosed form, though now levelled beyond recognition on the ground, belongs to a broad family of earthwork enclosures found widely across Ireland, some of which served as farmsteads, some as ceremonial spaces, and some, more speculatively, as sites of local assembly or early settlement. The enclosure sits close to a field boundary on its northern side, which may well have preserved its footprint on paper even as the earthworks themselves were gradually erased by centuries of agricultural use.