Enclosure, Knockatinty, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Enclosures
In the townland of Knockatinty, in County Clare, there is an enclosure.
That sentence, spare as it is, may be close to the limit of what can currently be said with confidence about this particular site. It appears on the archaeological record, it has been assigned a monument number, and it carries the designation that archaeologists use for one of the most common, and most quietly mysterious, features in the Irish landscape.
Enclosures, as a category, cover a broad range of structures. The term can describe a ringfort, a cashel, a burial enclosure, or simply a defined area bounded by an earthen bank or stone wall whose original purpose has been lost to time. They appear in almost every county, and Clare, with its limestone plains and early medieval farming settlements, has more than its share. Knockatinty is a small rural townland, and without further detail it is impossible to say whether what survives here is a low, grass-covered bank, a more substantial earthwork, or something reduced almost entirely to a crop mark or soil shadow. The enclosure exists in the record, and it exists on the ground, but the particulars remain, for now, unrecorded in any publicly accessible form.