Knockagure Fort, Ballyknock, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Ringforts
On a low hillock in Ballyknock, County Clare, sits a circular earthwork that still functions, in a quiet way, as an entrance and exit.
Two original ramp openings, one to the north-north-east and one to the south-south-west, remain in use today, meaning that people are still walking in and out of a structure whose origins stretch back well beyond living memory. That continuity of access, unremarked and unplanned, is one of the stranger things about it.
The enclosure is roughly circular, measuring about 34 metres across, and takes the form of a raised, grass-covered platform defined by a scarp, a steep slope marking the boundary between the interior and the ground beyond. The scarp runs to between 0.7 and 0.8 metres high for most of its circuit, rising to around 1.2 metres on the eastern side. From the south-west around to the north, a drystone wall replaces the earthen scarp, with a stand of coniferous trees growing just outside it. There is no fosse, the encircling ditch that often accompanies this kind of earthwork, which makes the site somewhat harder to read in the landscape than a more typical ringfort. Classified officially as an enclosure rather than a fort in survey records from the 1990s, it occupies a category that acknowledges uncertainty about function and date. Such enclosures in Ireland were constructed across a wide span of time and served many purposes, from agricultural enclosures to defended farmsteads, and without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than the physical remains themselves allow.
The two ramp entrances are wide enough to suggest use by animals as well as people, and the northern entrance at six metres across is particularly generous. The drystone wall section, combined with the tree line outside it, gives that part of the circuit a slightly more enclosed and sheltered feel than the open scarp on the opposite side.