Enclosure, Knockanree, Co. Wicklow

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Knockanree, Co. Wicklow

On a low ridge at Knockanree in County Wicklow, a burial was tucked away inside a rectangular enclosure so inconspicuous that its outline was captured on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map without anyone, it seems, making much of what lay within it.

The discovery came in 1933, when a small cist was found at the site. A cist is a box-like grave constructed from flat stone slabs, in this case just four, fitted with a capstone and measuring roughly 43 centimetres by 30 centimetres, barely large enough to contain what it held: a food vessel, a type of ceramic pottery associated with Bronze Age burial practice, typically placed alongside the dead as an offering or provision for the afterlife.

The enclosure itself had apparently been noted decades before the cist came to light, with references appearing in published sources from as early as 1916 and later cited by the archaeologist John Waddell in 1990. What the enclosure originally looked like, and how it related to the cist within it, is not fully resolved. What remains visible today is a small cairn, a mound of loose stones, with traces of stone facing along its edges; this may represent part of the original enclosure rather than a separate monument entirely. The site sits on level ground toward the south-western end of the ridge, and while the rectangular plan recorded in the nineteenth century is no longer clearly legible, the cairn and its faced stonework offer a faint physical echo of whatever arrangement once stood here.

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