Enclosure, Knocklofty Demesne, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knocklofty Demesne, Co. Tipperary

On the south-facing slope of Guggy Hill in County Tipperary, two circular enclosures once sat side by side in the grounds of Knocklofty Demesne.

Today, one of them has vanished so completely that nothing remains above ground. The earth has been levelled, the surrounding woodland cleared, and the field boundary that once marked its eastern edge removed. What was there, and roughly how old or significant it might have been, can only be inferred from the shape it left behind.

The enclosure shows up on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map edition of 1904 to 1905 as a circular raised area roughly 32 metres in diameter, sitting within a wooded part of the demesne with field boundaries to either side. Curiously, it does not appear at all on the first edition of the same map series, surveyed around 1840, which raises questions about whether it was simply missed, obscured by vegetation, or had not yet been recognised as a distinct feature. The more revealing evidence came later, from the air. An aerial photograph captured both this enclosure and a slightly smaller companion enclosure attached to its eastern side, visible as cropmarks, the kind of faint discolouration in growing crops that betrays buried or disturbed ground beneath. Cropmarks are often the only surviving record of features that have been ploughed flat over generations of agriculture, and that is precisely the situation here. The western field boundary has survived, and a farm roadway now runs along its eastern edge up toward the hill's summit, but the enclosures themselves have left no trace a person walking the field would notice.

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