Enclosure, Tully, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Enclosures
In a field in Tully, Co. Westmeath, a townland boundary does something quietly telling.
Rather than cutting a straight line across the landscape, it curves outward at one particular point, bending to accommodate a circular feature in the grass beneath it. That kind of deference, built into the administrative geometry of the land itself, suggests that whoever drew or maintained this boundary recognised something worth avoiding, even if the thing being avoided had long since disappeared from view.
The feature in question is a roughly circular enclosure, approximately 25 metres in diameter, now visible only as a cropmark or soil variation in aerial photography. Its outline appeared on satellite imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, the sort of ghostly impression that shows up when differential moisture or growth betrays what lies beneath ploughed or grazed ground. An enclosure of this kind would typically have consisted of an earthen bank or fosse defining a bounded space, though what purpose it served, domestic, ritual, agricultural, is not recorded here. What gives it additional interest is its position in the landscape. A ringfort, the remains of an early medieval enclosed farmstead, lies roughly 345 metres to the south-southwest. More striking still, an inauguration site sits approximately 440 metres to the west. Inauguration sites in Ireland are places associated with the formal installation of Gaelic lords, often marked by specific topographical or ceremonial features, and their presence in a landscape tends to signal that the surrounding area held some political or symbolic weight in the early medieval period. Whether this enclosure relates in any meaningful way to that cluster of sites is unknown, but the proximity is not easily dismissed.