Hilltop enclosure, Knocksaintlour, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
A low arc of earthen bank running along the northern edge of a Tipperary hilltop is all that remains above ground of what was once a substantial circular enclosure, and the site might have stayed entirely unnoticed had an aerial photographer not spotted the telling geometry of its cropmarks in 2012.
From the air, the near-circular outline becomes legible again, measuring roughly 76 metres north to south and 63 metres east to west, the pale lines in the pasture tracing a boundary that centuries of ploughing and grazing have otherwise erased.
The monument sits on the summit of Knocksaintlour hill, and it is the kind of site that archaeology tends to find before walkers do. Colm Chambers identified it through aerial photography in 2012, and the surviving bank in the northern arc has since been measured: around 1.1 metres high on the interior face, 1.2 metres on the exterior, and 3.3 metres wide at its base. That surviving stretch has been absorbed into a modern east-west field boundary, which is why it persists at all; the rest of the enclosing element has been levelled to nothing. There is a faint outer fosse, a shallow ditch running alongside the bank, though it may simply be a hollow worn by animals sheltering against the earthwork over generations. A depression in the north-east quadrant hints at possible quarrying at some point. What gives the site its quiet significance is its position within a wider prehistoric landscape: the Rock of Cashel lies 3.1 kilometres to the north-north-west, a possible henge monument sits at Carron roughly 1.8 kilometres to the south, and the Rathnadrinna hilltop enclosure is visible just 650 metres to the east. Hilltop enclosures of this kind, roughly circular earthworks crowning elevated ground, are not well understood, but their tendency to cluster in visible relationship with one another suggests that the choice of hilltop was rarely accidental.