Ringfort (Rath), Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

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Ringforts

Ringfort (Rath), Knockkelly, Co. Tipperary

In the forestry above Knockkelly, a pair of earthen banks and their accompanying ditches have been quietly holding their shape for over a thousand years.

What makes this particular ringfort, a type of circular enclosure typically dating from the early medieval period in Ireland and associated with farmsteads or places of local authority, worth pausing over is the sheer scale of its construction. Most ringforts are univallate, meaning a single bank and ditch. This one is bivallate, with two concentric banks separated by a substantial U-shaped fosse, or ditch, and enclosed again by a further outer fosse. The effort involved in raising these earthworks by hand suggests that whoever commissioned them expected both permanence and a degree of prestige.

The site occupies a roughly oval area of approximately fifty metres north to south and fifty-five metres east to west, set on a west-south-west-facing slope within what is now a forestry plantation. The inner bank reaches over two metres in height, and the outer bank is taller still, rising to more than three metres on the interior face. Between them, the intervening fosse drops to a depth of around three and a half metres at its deepest, which is considerable. Gaps in both the inner and outer banks at the west-south-west and north-west indicate the original entrance points, and there may have been a causeway crossing the fosse at the west-south-west, though overgrowth now obscures much of it. A further ringfort of similar bivallate construction lies roughly three hundred metres to the north, and an enclosure of some kind sits about two hundred metres to the east, hinting that this was once a more populated or organised landscape than the current treeline suggests.

The site is enclosed by forestry to its north and east, and the interior slope is now largely covered in vegetation. A berm, a narrow flat ledge partway up the outer bank, is visible from the north and east but disappears under overgrowth towards the south and south-west, where a field boundary may have clipped the earthwork at some point. These details are worth keeping in mind when moving around the site, as the preservation varies noticeably depending on the direction of approach.

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