Ballincurra Hill, Ballincurra, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Forts

Ballincurra Hill, Ballincurra, Co. Tipperary

At the exact point where three townland boundaries converge, on the domed summit of a hill at the northern edge of the Silvermines Mountains, there sits a hillfort that has lost most of itself to commercial forestry.

Around two thirds of its circuit now lies beneath plantation, and the remainder is smothered in heather. What survives is, in places, quietly impressive, and what the site represents geographically and archaeologically is stranger still.

The fort is oval in plan, stretching roughly 120 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and about 102 metres across. It is univallate, meaning it has a single line of defences rather than the concentric rings associated with more elaborate examples of the type. That defence takes different forms depending on where you look. Along much of the circuit, an earthen bank, composed of soil with some stone breaking through the surface, is accompanied by an outer fosse, a broad ditch that reaches a V-shaped profile on the eastern side, narrowing to about two metres at the base before widening again. In the south-east quadrant, however, the builders dispensed with the ditch entirely and instead cut a scarp nearly 2.6 metres high directly into the natural rock. No entrance features have been identified at any point along the circuit. Near the centre of the enclosed area sits a cairn, a mound of heaped stone, its original purpose unrecorded, now covered in heather like almost everything else up here. The neighbouring hillfort at Knockadigeen lies just 1.4 kilometres to the north-east, which raises the question of what drew people to fortify this particular cluster of summits, though no answer is currently on offer. The site was surveyed by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien in 2002, and did not appear on Ordnance Survey mapping until the second edition series, suggesting it went unrecognised in cartographic terms until relatively recently.

The convergence of the Ballincurra, Killeen, and Kilnaneave townland boundaries at the hillfort's centre is the kind of detail that tends to get buried in technical descriptions, but it hints at how long this elevated ground has served as a reference point in the local landscape, long after whatever community built the fort had gone.

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Pete F
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