Enclosure, Middlequarter, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Middlequarter, Co. Tipperary

On the eastern slopes of Knocknagearagh in the Knockmealdown mountains, a low rubble wall traces a rectangle roughly forty metres across, its sandstone courses now largely swallowed by grass and heather.

What makes this enclosure quietly arresting is not the wall itself, which survives to less than a metre in height, but what surrounds it: hut sites, clearance cairns, a possible ring-cairn, and the remnants of a field system, all scattered across the same upland terrain. Taken together, they suggest a landscape that was once organised, inhabited, and worked, before the mountain reclaimed it.

The enclosure was recorded as part of this wider complex by Diarmuid O'Keeffe in 1996. The sandstone rubble wall measures between 2.2 and 2.6 metres wide, and the interior, which follows the natural eastward slope of the hillside, is defined on the north-eastern and north-western axes at roughly 40.5 metres and 42 metres respectively. A possible entrance, about 4.15 metres wide, sits at the northern end of the eastern side, and the northern wall extends a further 8 metres eastward beyond the enclosure itself, in what may have been a deliberate arrangement to funnel movement through that gap. Clearance cairns are a familiar feature of upland farming landscapes; they are essentially the accumulated stone removed from fields to make cultivation possible, piled at the margins and left behind when the land was eventually abandoned. Their presence here, alongside the hut sites and field boundaries, points to a community that was managing this terrain in a sustained and purposeful way, though the precise period of occupation remains unclear.

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Pete F
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