Enclosure, Knockgraffon, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Enclosures
On the summit of Knockillon Hill in County Tipperary, a grass-covered bank curves in a half-arc and then simply stops.
What was once an oval enclosure is now only its southern half, the northern portion having been quarried away at some point before the twentieth century. By the time the second Ordnance Survey edition was being compiled between 1901 and 1905, the loss was already visible on the maps; the earlier 1840 edition had shown the full oval, but the later revision recorded only the surviving fragment.
The remaining bank is compact and well-defined, built from clay and gravel and measuring roughly 4.9 metres across at the base, with an interior height of around 0.87 metres and an exterior height that varies between half a metre and just over a metre. Immediately to the north-west sits a mound barrow, a type of funerary monument in which a burial is covered by a constructed earthen mound, and the two features are separated by a shallow depression. On the western side, the enclosure bank rises 1.32 metres above that depression, giving a sense of how the two monuments once related to each other on the hilltop. The triangulation station marking the hill's high point at 402 feet lies just to the south-west, so the enclosure sits very close to the summit itself. The purpose of such hilltop enclosures is not always straightforward to determine, and without excavation the date of construction remains open.
When last inspected, the monument was heavily overgrown with nettles, which gives some indication of what a visitor might expect underfoot. The surviving bank is clearest in the southern and western quadrants, where the relationship with the adjacent barrow is most legible.