Enclosure, Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

On an east-facing slope at Knockkelly in County Tipperary, there is a prehistoric enclosure that has been almost entirely erased from the landscape, not gradually by time, but in two distinct acts of clearance within living memory.

What survives now is, in the most literal sense, a monument to its own disappearance.

The enclosure was recorded on the second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1903 to 1904 as a circular earthwork roughly fifty metres in overall diameter, enclosed by a bank and already bisected by a field boundary, with a trackway running along the edge of its north-eastern quadrant. Enclosures of this type, defined by an earthen bank and sometimes an accompanying ditch, are among the most common archaeological features in the Irish countryside, associated broadly with early medieval settlement and farming, though many have far older origins. By the time Cahill documented the site in 1982, the western half had already been removed, with only a fifteen-metre-wide portion still showing one bank and one ditch. Then, during the 1980s, the eastern half was levelled in turn. A farm shed now occupies the western side, a trackway with a deep drain runs north to south through what was the centre of the monument, and the eastern half survives only as a barely traceable semi-circular scarp, measuring roughly thirty-two metres north to south and fourteen metres east to west, visible mainly as a slight change in the ground rather than as any upstanding earthwork. Without knowing where to look, and what you are looking for, there is effectively nothing left to see.

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Pete F
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