Enclosure, Gortaknockeare, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortaknockeare, Co. Tipperary

A low circular earthwork sitting quietly in pasture at the upper edge of the 300-foot contour in County Tipperary is easy to pass without a second glance.

Nothing announces it. The banks have been worn down over centuries to little more than gentle swellings in the ground, and yet the geometry is still there, readable to anyone who knows what to look for.

The enclosure came to formal attention through aerial photography, identified on surveys carried out in April 1974 and again in May 1977. What those images revealed, and what ground survey has since confirmed, is a roughly circular ringfort, a type of enclosed farmstead common throughout early medieval Ireland, measuring approximately 22 metres north to south and 20 metres east to west. A ringfort of this kind typically comprised a family's dwelling place, its surrounding bank offering a degree of protection for livestock as much as for people. Here, the inner bank has been reduced almost entirely to a scarp, standing just 0.1 metres on its interior face, though the outer bank retains rather more presence, rising to nearly a metre on its inner side. Between them runs a fosse, a shallow ditch roughly 1.2 metres wide, which would once have added to the enclosure's definition. Along the southern to north-eastern arc, a second outer bank, around 8 metres wide, reinforces the structure further. The eastern side of the enclosure is formed not by independent earthworks but by the curving scarp of a conjoined enclosure immediately adjacent, suggesting that two separate but related enclosures once shared a boundary here. Toward the south of the interior, a raised area has been interpreted as a possible former hut site, and a likely entrance, approximately 3.5 to 4 metres wide, opens at the south. A raised mound lies just beyond the enclosure to the south as well. The site does not stand in isolation; further enclosures lie roughly 300 metres to the east-south-east, and another possible example sits around 400 metres to the north-west, hinting at a broader pattern of early settlement across this part of Tipperary.

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