Enclosure, Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

By 1975, the enclosure at Knockkelly had already been reduced to a shallow depression in a field of improved pasture, its bank pushed downslope by agricultural clearance.

What had once read clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1905 as a circular enclosure with an overall diameter of around 60 metres had, within a few decades, become little more than a ghost in the ground, detectable mainly as a gentle circular hollow measuring roughly 44 metres across at its longest axis.

The site sits on a steep south-west-facing slope in County Tipperary, in the company of a bivallate ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement defined by two concentric earthen banks and ditches, lying approximately 200 metres to the west. That proximity suggests the two monuments may have shared the same agricultural or social landscape in early medieval Ireland, when enclosed farmsteads of this kind were common features of the countryside. A former field boundary running roughly east-north-east to west-south-west had already cut across the south-east sector of the enclosure before levelling completed the damage, leaving only traces of the defining bank and the faint circular depression recorded by Cahill in 1975. The enclosure's original function is not recorded, but circular earthwork enclosures of this kind in Ireland are broadly associated with settlement, ritual, or stock management, sometimes all three at different points in a site's history.

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