Enclosure, Gortaknockeare, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Gortaknockeare, Co. Tipperary

A field in Gortaknockeare, County Tipperary, looks like ordinary grazing land.

The surface shifts gently underfoot, with faint humps and hollows that suggest nothing in particular to the eye. Yet beneath that unremarkable pasture, near the top of a south-facing slope, lies a complex of earthwork enclosures that has effectively vanished from view at ground level, surviving now only as a ghost on old maps and as the subtlest of impressions in the turf.

The picture that emerges from cartographic evidence is a layered and somewhat puzzling one. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, shows two roughly circular conjoined enclosures on the site. By the time of the 1954 revision, the depiction had shifted considerably, now indicating a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 46 metres east to west and narrowing from around 27 metres at its eastern end to about 20 metres at the west, with what appears to be an entrance in the western portion of the southern bank. Immediately to the north sits a roughly D-shaped enclosure, sharing its southern bank with the rectangular one and measuring about 51 metres along that shared edge. Beyond both of these lies an outer curvilinear scarp sweeping from the southwest around to the north, broken by a gap of 13 metres on the western side, and sitting roughly 39 metres north of the D-shaped enclosure's northern bank. Whether the two nineteenth-century circular enclosures represent an earlier and different phase of the site, or simply reflect a different surveying convention, is not clear. Enclosures of this general type, earthwork-defined spaces used variously for settlement, farming, or ritual across many centuries of Irish prehistory and early history, are common enough in Tipperary, but the structural complexity here, with its interlocking forms and outer circuit, sets this one apart from the more straightforward examples. Three natural ponds cluster nearby, one to the east of the rectangular enclosure, one to the south, and one to the west, an arrangement that may have made the spot particularly attractive to whoever originally chose it.

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Pete F
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