Enclosure, Ballyknockane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Ballyknockane, Co. Tipperary

On the southern slopes of Slievenamon, a mountain in County Tipperary long freighted with myth and folklore, there is an enclosure that no longer exists to the eye.

The ground gives nothing away: rough pasture, gently rolling terrain, no visible earthwork, no raised rim. Yet the Ordnance Survey maps of 1901 to 1905 recorded it plainly, a roughly circular area somewhere between 35 and 40 metres in diameter, defined by a scarp, meaning a low slope or bank that once marked its perimeter. Whatever the enclosure originally was, whether a ringfort, a livestock enclosure, or something older, it has been levelled entirely, absorbed back into the working landscape.

What remains is a kind of negative evidence. A field boundary running east to west along the northern edge of where the monument once stood is still intact, and it does something quietly telling: it curves outward at the point where it meets the old enclosure. Drystone walls tend to run straight or follow the logic of the land, so that deflection suggests the boundary was built to accommodate the enclosure, or at least to acknowledge it, rather than plough through it. Rubble has been heaped against the southern face of that wall, and immediately to the northeast there is a steep drop into a disused quarry. The quarrying activity so close to the site may well have contributed to the monument's disappearance, though the notes do not say so directly.

For anyone walking the slopes of Slievenamon in this area, the site itself offers no visual reward. What is worth attention is precisely that curve in the drystone wall, a small but legible trace of how people once worked around something they recognised, even if we can no longer say exactly what it was.

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Pete F
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